The VX-800 is a small, entry level webcam with an approachable personality and a price tag that can't be beat! The initial ask for this product came from marketing in the form of a handful of potential, off-the-shelf, "pic" products. Pic products are offered by manufacturers to businesses with the lure of eliminating design time and reducing COGS (cost of goods sold) as well as the cost of tooling. Unfortunately the majority of these products are designed quickly and blindly, without regard for a company's design aesthetic so that they can be shopped around to several businesses.  

As expected, the "Pic" products that were available to us fell far outside of our established design language.  We felt strongly within the ID team that all hardware design must stay in house to insure a consistent design language and a steady ranking of products from the low end to high. ID proposed to marketing that the camera be designed in-house with the promise of record low COGS.

We had only a week to design the product.  The ID group worked to design a camera that would sit firmly at the end of our line, taking design cues from it's siblings without cannibalizing their sales.  The final design leverages the base from the Msft Lifecam VX-2000 and uses only two additional parts to construct the main housing.  The low part count and tooling cost made this camera even cheaper to produce then the "Pic" options originally proposed.

Laser Cut Birch Jewelry

From the beginning, my vision for this project was to release a cohesive, wearable collection. I would stay late after work in the basement machine shop, experimenting with wood types, number of ply's, and laser settings, until the last bus would come by at midnight. When I showed the initial pieces to a stylist friend of mine, she asked to place them in an upcoming shoot.

I worked tirelessly to make the deadline for the photo shoot and created some of my favorite pieces. (Great thanks to photographer Kyle Johnson and stylist, Osiris Navaro.) That following week I worked on assembling the lookbook and sending out PDFs and printed materials to boutiques across the country. Even after all the work I had put in, I felt some surprise when orders started coming in for my designs.

I was able to outsource the laser cutting to a great local machine shop and with the help of a a handful of friends, was able to assemble, tag and inventory the pieces and fill the orders in a timely manner. It's amazing the amount of labor your friends will offer up for free when there is beer and Thai food involved (but really, thanks again to all of you who helped make this project come to life).

More After the Jump...

I came on board with Microsoft Hardware just as the evaluation units for this new mouse were coming back from the manufacturer. I jumped in and did some deep trend research for the coming year and emerged with a nice pallet that ended up gaining a lot of attention and selling really well. A great way to start out at a new company!

One of the greatest resources for the designers at Msft is our model shop. One of our model makers specializes in color matching. It's quite a science but more than that, you've really got to have an eye for nuances within color. It was a cool experience working with him and I picked up a whole new vocabulary for talking about color.