Industrial Design Firm for B2B Hardware.
Senior industrial design and mechanical engineering on a monthly retainer, embedded in your team, from proof of concept to manufacture-ready.
Companies we have worked with:
Four steps from first call to manufacture-ready.
- 0120 to 30 min
Discovery call
We walk through the product, the stage you are at, and where form, CMF, and product identity is currently blocking the roadmap. You get an honest read on whether we are the right team, including when we are not.
- 022 to 4 weeks
Design sprint
A fixed-fee starter project aimed at one clear deliverable. It gives you real output, a working relationship, and a realistic view of pace before anything ongoing is signed.
- 03Every week
Iterate weekly
Once the retainer starts we ship in weekly cycles. You see CAD, drawings, and renders as they land, review them in your own tools, and steer the next week in a short call. Nothing waits for a monthly reveal.
- 04At release
Manufacture-ready handoff
Every program ends in a release package your supplier can quote and build from: native CAD, neutral formats, dimensioned drawings, BOM, and a change log. If you hire in-house later, the files are in a state a new engineer can inherit on day one.
Concrete deliverables, not a slide deck.
CAD models
Concept and production CAD driven by the industrial design intent, not reverse-engineered from it. Parametric assemblies built for change, with feature trees a future engineer can read, delivered natively and as STEP.
Enclosure design
Housings, brackets, seals, and mounts designed around your real electronics stack-up, thermal path, and ingress requirements rather than a generic box.
DFM review
Part consolidation, draft, wall thickness, bend allowance, and fastener strategy reviewed against your supplier's actual capability before tooling money is committed.
Prototype support
3D printing, CNC, and sheet fabrication coordinated with your shops or ours. We chase quotes, check incoming parts, and turn iterations in days.
Manufacturing drawings
ASME Y14.5 GD&T drawing packages with datum schemes and inspection callouts, so the shop can quote and inspect on the first pass.
3D renders
Photoreal stills and product motion built straight from the engineering CAD, ready for a deck, a data sheet, or a launch page before tooling comes back.
Questions we get asked.
What does an industrial design company actually deliver?
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A working set of concept directions, then one refined direction taken into CAD with real electronics, mounting, and thermal constraints applied. Alongside that you get CMF specification, ergonomics for the technician or operator who handles the product, and photoreal renders built from the engineering model. On a retainer with us the same team then carries that design through mechanical engineering and DFM.
How is this different from hiring an in-house designer?
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An in-house designer takes three to six months to recruit and covers one discipline. An industrial design firm on retainer starts next week and brings design, mechanical engineering, and visualization under one monthly fee. When your roadmap eventually justifies permanent headcount, we help scope the role and hand the files over cleanly.
What industries do you design for?
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Robotics and automation, defense and aerospace, climate and energy hardware, medical and lab devices, and industrial machinery. We work almost entirely on B2B and B2G products where the design has to survive an install, a service call, and a procurement review.
How fast can we start?
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Typically within a week. Most teams open with a two to four week fixed-fee design sprint on one concrete deliverable, which gives you real output before any ongoing commitment is signed.
What an industrial design company should do for hardware that has to work first
Most industrial design firms come from a consumer background, where the object sits on a shelf and the visual language does the heavy lifting. B2B and B2G hardware works differently. The object lives in a warehouse, a data center, a hospital corridor, or on the side of a forklift, and the form has to survive that environment while still reading as a considered product from a serious company.
Lucent is an industrial design company built around that context, and the kind of industrial design firm that works in CAD from the first week. We design enclosures, mounts, sensor units, gateways, and instrument-class hardware for teams that are shipping to enterprise and government buyers. The industrial design work is inseparable from the mechanical engineering underneath it, and both live inside the same retainer.
Capabilities inside the retainer.
One embedded team, one monthly fee. Scroll through what sits inside the contract, from first sketch to release package.
06 capabilities
- 01 / 06
Form and volume studies
Sketch through to blocked-out CAD, run against real electronics stack-ups, mounting constraints, and environmental requirements from the first exploration.
- 02 / 06
Ergonomics for professional users
Handles, grips, install poses, service access, and one-handed operation for the technician, operator, or clinician who will actually touch the product every day.
- 03 / 06
CMF specification
Materials, finishes, and color, chosen against the environment the product ships into. Powder coats and anodizing that survive a working warehouse, not moodboards that look good in a studio.
- 04 / 06
Brand-aligned solution identity
A visual language that carries across a product family, so your gateway, sensor node, and installer kit read as one company without looking identical.
- 05 / 06
Photoreal renders and animation
Hero shots and product motion built from the engineering CAD, ready for a keynote, a Series B deck, or the front of your data sheet before the first tooling comes back.
- 06 / 06
Trade show and launch collateral
Booth models, cutaways, and exploded views that make the technology legible to a buyer who has thirty seconds to understand what the product does.
Want to see whether a retainer fits your roadmap?
What sets an industrial design firm for B2B hardware apart from a consumer studio?
Consumer industrial design optimizes for shelf appeal and unboxing. B2B and B2G industrial design optimizes for the install, the service call, and the procurement conversation. The product has to be recognizably yours in a photograph, and it has to explain itself to a facilities manager who has never heard of you.
That means the industrial design firm working on it needs to sit next to the mechanical engineer, not upstream of them. When form and CAD are separated, the form gets watered down at DFM and the product ships as a compromise. We keep them in the same room, on the same retainer, from the first sketch to the release package.
When in the roadmap should we bring in an industrial design firm?
The best moment to bring in an industrial design firm is once your working principle is validated and before you spend on tooling. At that point the electronics footprint is stable enough to design around, and the form still has room to influence the mechanical architecture.
We also join teams that already have a shipping product and need a second, third, or refresh generation. In that case the industrial design work runs alongside the mechanical engineering update, so the new form ships with a cleaner DFM story and a lower BOM at the same time.
How the retainer works.
- 0120–30 min
Intro call
We learn the solution, the stage, and what is blocking you. No pitch, no slide deck.
- 022–4 weeks
Design sprint
A fixed-fee starter project on one clear deliverable, so you see how we work before any ongoing commitment.
- 031 session
Sprint review
We present the work and map the next 90 days together, what to build, what to validate, what to leave alone.
- 04Monthly
Retainer
We scope the real workload and send a proposal for a fixed monthly fee. Embedded team, no time-tracking, cancel with notice.
Common questions.
- Occasionally. Our focus is B2B and B2G hardware where engineering rigor matters more than retail packaging. If your product will sit on a retail shelf, we can point you to firms that specialize in that.
- Usually two to three genuinely different directions after a short discovery phase, then a single direction refined through CAD. We do not present ten variations of the same idea to pad the deck.
- Yes. CMF is part of the industrial design deliverable. We specify against real supplier catalogs, request finish samples, and validate them under the environmental conditions the product will ship into.
- Yes. Renders and animation produced under the retainer transfer to you with an IP assignment. You can use them across your site, deck, ads, trade show, and sales collateral without a separate license fee.
- Every engagement starts with a mutual NDA. Work in progress lives in access-controlled cloud folders, and nothing goes into our portfolio without written approval, which we usually request after your public launch.
Let's design your next solution, together.
Tell us where the solution is and what's blocking you, we'll tell you honestly whether a retainer makes sense, or what we'd do instead.