Our expertise

A great product requires design and development, working as one.

Close-up of hands assembling or adjusting a gray cylindrical smart speaker with round buttons and a sliding switch on the side, with two similar speakers in white and black blurred in the background on a table.

Fresco brings together the industrial design, ergonomic design, rapid prototyping, engineering, and manufacturing services needed to take your product from concept to production-ready.

Concept sketches of BottleKeeper family products show three drink holders: a PintKeeper holding a pint beer glass labeled 16 oz, a BottleKeeper holding a 12 oz bottle, and a CanKeeper holding a 16 oz large beer can. Outline sketches of a wine bottle and glass suggest a possible WineKeeper product. The designs highlight insulated sleeves fitting standard beverage containers.

Design Innovation

Before we start designing, we help you define exactly where your product can create the most value. Both for the people who use it, and for the business behind it.

Product Strategy & Positioning

Identifying where a product can create the greatest value, defining its role, differentiation, audience, and strategic direction.

User Research & Insights

Discovering user needs, behaviors, motivations, and pain points through focused research to give the design team a grounded basis for decision-making.

Experience Journey Mapping

Mapping the complete user experience across key moments, interactions, and touchpoints to reveal opportunities, friction, and priorities for product improvement.

Competitive Benchmarking

Evaluating competing products, experiences, technologies, and market trends to identify gaps and meaningful ways for a new solution to stand apart.

Product Line Roadmapping

Planning how your product family will evolve over time, aligning user needs, business priorities, technology, and opportunities.

Industrial Design

We design how a product looks, feels, functions, and fits into the way people actually use it. We bring together user needs, business goals, and technology constraints, to create products that are both desirable and achievable.

Concept Development

Exploring a wide range of product ideas, architectures, and designs, then developing the strongest concepts into clear, compelling, and actionable directions.

Usability Design

Shaping controls, interactions, interfaces, and physical relationships around real user behavior, so products feel intuitive, comfortable, and easy to understand.

Form Development

Developing product form with disciplined attention to proportion, ergonomics, manufacturability, and brand, creating designs that feel intentional from every angle.

CMF (Color, Material, Finish)

Defining color, materials, textures, finishes, and graphic treatments to support product character, durability, manufacturing requirements, and brand expression.

Visual Brand Language

Creating a cohesive visual language of forms, details, proportions, and signatures that makes products recognizable and consistent across a growing portfolio.

Physical UX/UI Design

Designing the physical touchpoints of interaction, including controls, indicators, interfaces, and feedback, so hardware communicates clearly and behaves naturally.

Out-of-Box Experience & Packaging

Packaging that optimizes how products are protected, presented, accessed, and understood. From concepts through prototyping and user testing, we develop packaging that is intuitive and ready for mass production.

3D Visualization

High-quality 3D visuals and animations bring products and ideas to life. From photorealistic imagery to technical storytelling, interactive experiences, and demonstrations, these assets communicate product functionality and build excitement.

White mannequin head wearing black headphones on a table next to a laptop displaying force measurement software with values including a total force of -2.14.

Human Factors & Ergonomics

Our body-first design ethos drives us to constantly consider fit, comfort, performance, and usability. By combining a mastery of human data with physical product design, we create products that delight every user.

Inclusive & Universal Design

Designing products to accommodate a broad range of bodies, abilities, and use conditions, reducing barriers while improving comfort, access, and usability for everyone.

Human-Product Simulation

Bringing together posable 3D human data and product CAD to simulate motion and evaluate fit, reach, posture, clearance, and interaction before committing to physical prototypes.

Usability Prototyping

Building targeted prototypes to evaluate how people operate, understand, and interact with a product, allowing usability issues to be identified and resolved early.

Human Factors Testing

Planning and conducting structured studies with representative users to evaluate ergonomics, comprehension, performance, safety, and use-related risks under realistic conditions.

Man working at a desk with two monitors displaying 3D CAD software; one screen shows an exploded view of a mechanical part, and the man holds a physical white plastic component while using a keyboard. Various tools including a caliper and screwdriver lie on the wooden desk.

Product Development

Throughout product development, our industrial designers and engineers iterate and innovate to find creative engineering solutions, navigating manufacturing and performance constraints, and solving issues on the product's path to production.

Design Engineering

Translating design intent into robust product architecture and detailed geometry, resolving mechanical, assembly, material, and manufacturing constraints without losing the original design vision.

Mechanical Engineering

Engineering structures, components, and assemblies for performance, reliability, safety, and manufacturability, using analysis and testing to support confident product decisions.

Mechanism Development

Conceiving, prototyping, and refining mechanisms that deliver the required motion, feel, force, durability, and user experience within real packaging and manufacturing constraints.

Design Validation

Testing and evaluating prototypes against functional, ergonomic, dimensional, and performance requirements, identifying issues and refining the design before production commitment.

Design for Manufacturing & Assembly

Optimizing parts and assemblies for efficient manufacturing, reducing cost, part count, and assembly risk, while protecting product performance, quality, and design intent.

Class-A Surfacing

Creating production-quality exterior surfaces with the precise continuity, highlights, transitions, and curvature control that premium finishes demand.

Part Design & Tooling Release Geometry

Delivering production-ready part geometry with draft, shelled with wall thickness, ribs, bosses and tolerances resolved.  

Close-up of a CNC milling machine cutting parallel slots into a light-colored material, producing fine dust around the engraved lines.

In-House Prototyping

We prototype daily, moving you from design concept to physical product smoothly and efficiently. Each build and iteration answers a critical question or validates a design direction.

Rapid Prototyping

Rapidly building and iterating physical parts and assemblies using additive manufacturing, clay, foam, machining, and fabrication, to accelerate solutions.

Appearance Models

Creating high-fidelity models that accurately represent final form, color, material, finish, graphics, and details for evaluation, presentations, and stakeholder review.

Functional Prototypes

Building working prototypes that reproduce key mechanical, ergonomic, and performance characteristics so critical functions can be refined and demonstrated before production.

Short-Run Production

Producing limited quantities of finished parts and assemblies for pilots, field trials, and early customer use before full-scale manufacturing begins.

Testing & Validation

Designing and performing practical tests to verify fit, function, performance, and assembly, to guide refinement.

Color Material Finish (CMF) Development Workshops

Our CMF workshops refine beyond a standard color chip and pantone number, so teams can make real-time changes and informed decisions to compare colors, materials, textures, and finishes.

Man wearing glasses and a dark blue shirt holding a pen and paper while standing in front of an industrial machine with an orange control panel displaying data.

Manufacturing Sourcing & Development

Through our Fresco East studio in Suzhou, we’ve built a network of specialist suppliers, materials experts, and manufacturers. We work closely with these partners to deliver solutions that are fully de-risked and ready for production.

Material Sourcing

Identifying materials that meet your performance, appearance, regulatory, cost, supply, and manufacturing requirements.

Supplier/CM Search & Qualification

Assessing and qualifying the manufacturing partners best matched to your product, based on quality, capacity, cost, and timeline needs.

Process Creation & Development

Developing the production processes your product requires, including custom methods and workflows when no existing process delivers the result you need.

Prototype-to-Production Transition

Managing the handoff from working prototype to production line, resolving design, process, tooling, quality, and supplier issues before they become costly downstream problems.

“Fresco has turned an ambitious concept into a real product, combining design, engineering and manufacturing with a constant focus on making it better, simpler and scalable.”

Smiling man with short dark hair and slight stubble wearing a black t-shirt, posing with hands on hips against a plain light background.

Gastón Paladini

Founder, Bottlee

How we work

Our hands-on, iterative design approach quickly identifies product opportunities and dead ends, replacing assumptions with evidence, and pushing real innovation forward.

Our industrial designers and engineers shape the concept together. Form, human interaction, and technical constraints are solved in sync.

We prototype daily, moving quickly from idea to physical object to learn what works and identify opportunities for improvement.

With prototype in hand, we test against real-world conditions and real users, replacing assumptions with evidence.

What we learn drives the next cycle, with each loop getting tighter and more targeted until the design is refined and de-risked.

Design
Build
Test
Repeat
Close-up of a beige padded 4moms baby seat with a five-point safety harness

Whether you have a market opportunity to explore, an engineering prototype, or something in between, we build on what you have and get to work.

Get up and running with a Fresco Sprint.

Not sure where to start? Our focused sprints are designed as entry points into working with Fresco, giving you access to our senior expertise for a specific product challenge before committing to a full engagement. Fast, actionable, and grounded in the realities of product development.

Hand sketching product design concepts for a cylindrical container lid on a dotted notebook page surrounded by design tools on a wooden table.

Design for Funding Sprint

Design of a clear product vision and development plan that gives investors confidence in both your product and the path to market.

A hand holding a stylus is sketching red annotations on a 3D digital model of a curved, tubular object displayed on a tablet screen.

Design for Manufacturing Review

A thorough review of your product files that identifies manufacturing risks and guides you towards production readiness.

3D wireframe model of a human head shown from side and front angles wearing orange protective goggles with a yellow lens area.

Usability & Ergonomic Design Sprint

A data-backed ergonomic analysis to identify fit, comfort, and usability risks and recommend next steps.

Common questions about Fresco's expertise.

We only need help with one part of our product development. Can Fresco support that?

Yes. Many clients bring us in for a defined phase, or when they need additional expertise within an established program.  

We can step in for front-end innovation, an ergonomic study, CMF development, physical prototyping, mechanical engineering, DFM, 3D visualization, or wherever your team needs additional depth.

We have an established internal team, and a preferred way of working. How does Fresco integrate with our process and culture?

As a senior team accustomed to partnering with strong internal teams across global organizations, cultures, and styles, we know how to adapt, communicate clearly, and work in a way that empowers your team and accelerates program goals.

What industries or product categories does Fresco typically work in?

We work across numerous industries including wearables, robotics, medical devices, consumer products, healthcare, audio, industrial equipment, automotive, and emerging technology.

Across these industries, our work focuses on two areas: complex products that require senior, cross-functional expertise, and products where the user experience is critical to success.

Why does Fresco prototype throughout the design process?

Prototyping is embedded across all of product development because we have years of proof that with prototyping we innovate, better and faster.

We prototype from early proof-of-concept and ergonomic prototypes, to complex functional parts and assemblies, low-volume test builds, and fully-machined working units.

Does Fresco handle manufacturing?

We do not manufacture at scale. Working with our trusted manufacturing partners and/or yours, we develop a validated product and manufacturing plan.  

Through our Fresco East studio in Suzhou, China we vet manufacturing processes, source materials, and test low-volume pre-production builds to ensure a smooth transition from prototype to production.

We’re an early-stage startup preparing for a funding round. How can Fresco help?

For an early-stage startup, we recommend our Design for Funding Sprint. The outputs of this 2-3 week effort are designed to provide investors with the confidence and excitement to fund your next stage of development.

4moms

Keeping kids comfortable and parents happy, by design.

Neurable

Integrating brain interface tech with everyday wearables.