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What Makes a Great Product Design Consultancy?
If you’re wondering how to choose the right product design consultancy, the answer often lies in how a team thinks, collaborates, and measures success.
A product design consultancy is a multidisciplinary partner that helps founders, startups and established brands turn ideas into market-ready products, balancing user insight, technical feasibility, and business strategy.
Every object, interface, and service you love has something in common: it was designed with intent. Behind that intent is often a team like ours, people who bridge creativity and engineering to make meaningful innovation real.
At FLYNN, a UK-based product design consultancy, we believe great design consultancies don’t just make things look beautiful, they make them work beautifully for the business as well as the user. We think beyond the product itself, designing for better business outcomes: reducing risk, improving ROI, and ensuring every creative decision supports commercial success as much as human experience.
So, What Are the Attributes To Look For When Comparing Consultancies?
1. They design from first principles, not from trends
A great consultancy begins with questions, not assumptions.
Why does this product need to exist? What behaviour are we shaping? What impact will it have?
At FLYNN, our process starts with insight, observing how people interact with the world, identifying friction, and uncovering untapped potential in everyday systems. From there, we design from the ground up, not by mimicking what’s fashionable, but by solving what’s meaningful.
That’s how we move beyond trend-driven design and towards timeless utility.
Example: Liverpool FC came to us after spending six months with another London agency that couldn’t crack the Techball brief. From day one, we saw that the project needed a completely different approach. By rethinking the fundamentals, we turned it around and delivered the solution in only four weeks.
That work went on to be shortlisted for Innovation at Cannes Lions, proof that the right design approach creates results worth celebrating.
2. They integrate strategy and creativity
Design isn’t decoration, it’s strategy.
A great consultancy operates at the intersection of business intelligence and creative experimentation, translating commercial objectives into user-centred outcomes.
At FLYNN, every designer thinks like a strategist, and every strategist designs. This integration allows us to balance desirability, feasibility, and viability, ensuring that our products aren’t just loved by users but championed by businesses and supported by sustainable production.
Q: Why is strategy integration so important in product design?
A: Because it ensures what you create is viable, successful and lasting.
3. They collaborate like partners, not vendors
True design impact happens through partnership.
A great consultancy doesn’t simply take a brief and deliver assets, it embeds within a client’s team, co-creating solutions and sharing ownership of the outcome.
At FLYNN, collaboration is central to how we work. We sit alongside engineers, founders, and sustainability leads, turning complexity into clarity. This partnership mindset builds trust, shortens feedback loops, and leads to more resilient innovation.
For startups and global brands alike, this collaborative approach accelerates progress and creates designs that feel owned by everyone involved.
4. They design for sustainability and longevity
The best design consultancies think in decades, not quarters.
They recognise that every design decision, material, manufacturing method, energy use, shapes not only a product’s performance but its environmental footprint.
At FLYNN, sustainability is never an afterthought. We use lifecycle thinking from concept through to production, helping clients make responsible choices without compromising innovation. Because the most future-ready products are those that consider the future itself.
Our team partnered with Yeo Valley to help reduce single-use packaging, designing a refillable snack pot made from sustainable materials, built to be used, washed, and refilled time and time again.
5. They make the invisible visible
Design consultancy at its best reveals what others overlook.
Whether it’s simplifying a complex assembly, improving the ergonomics of a medical device, or making a new technology feel human, the magic lies in clarity.
At FLYNN, our role is to translate technical potential into emotional resonance. To make products not only usable but understandable. That’s the quiet power of design: making innovation feel inevitable.
6. They see what others can’t
Great design consultancies have vision. They can look beyond what’s immediately visible, connecting dots others miss and imagining solutions that redefine what’s possible. This isn’t about novelty for its own sake, but about seeing opportunity where others see constraint.
At FLYNN, we approach each project with curiosity and courage. Our teams think beyond convention to uncover new ways to solve complex problems, creating innovative products and systems that add real value to our clients’ businesses.
This mindset has guided our work across product design for over two decades, always searching for those opportunities others miss.
7. They measure success beyond launch
A great consultancy doesn’t stop when the prototype ships.
It learns, iterates, and evolves alongside the product. Because success isn’t measured by what’s launched, it’s measured by what lasts.
At FLYNN, we track how our designs perform in the world: user adoption, environmental impact, repairability, emotional attachment. These insights feed back into our process, ensuring that every project makes the next one better.
So, what makes a great product design consultancy?
It’s not just the size of their studio, the awards on their wall, or the clients they’ve worked with.
It’s their ability to create meaningful impact, consistently, collaboratively, and sustainably.
At FLYNN, that’s our north star: to design products that make life work better, for people, businesses, and the planet.
Takeaway
A great product design consultancy bridges creativity and consequence, creating solutions that endure.
That’s what FLYNN stands for.
Not just great design, but responsible innovation, from strategy to sustainability, from concept to commercial success.
We provide businesses with product design consultancy, industrial design, prototype design & related services.
