 Welcome to this episode of Door Hardware Nerds. I'm your host, Mia Merrill. Today, we're going to be doing a special interview on design and I have two guests with me. Can you please introduce yourselves? So my name is Paela Muñoz. I am the Global Head of Product Design. I'm based in Sweden in our headquarters in Stockholm. And my name is Joe Marton. I'm the Senior Manager of Industrial Design for North America. I'm headquartered here in New Haven, Connecticut. And I have a small team of industrial designers here to help support our efforts. Perfect. Well, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So Paela, you work with all the brands globally. Yes. What's the most interesting thing you've seen? Well, I couldn't just point out one thing. There are a lot of excitement in my work together with the teams. But since I'm here in the US and talking to you, I would like to mention one of my insights of what we are capable of, because many times when I talk about design, our products, people think about products coming out from a catalog and what you can find in the website. But in reality, we can do so much more. And with your permission, Joe, I have here one thing. This is one of many. And it's about customized products. And I would like to talk not only about what we can do to customize a product to meet the needs, specific needs, but the passion behind the product. And I know for sure the amount of work that we spend to create something that is very unique. And this is something that for me makes my heart beat a little bit faster because it's the craftsmanship of design that enable us to translate an idea to something real. It can be an idea from an architect. It can be an idea from someone that has the intention of create something, but we are actually the ones making it true. And then looking at the details, and this is just an example that I took from your table with your permission, but the level of detail that we can add in every single feature. And this means that it's not only a simple drawing in that we are machining everything, everything behind the scenes to create that and to take that vision, that idea to something real. There is a lot of passion involved. So I would say answering to your question, one of the most exciting things, I can pick this as an example that we can actually catch an emotion, catch an idea and make it come true. And perhaps you want to add something, Joe, about this, about the capability and all the knowledge that we have when we work with the customized products. First, this example that was just shown, this is part of a program of the development of customized hardware for houses of worship. And we have been, we've currently been working on many, many of these things, it's very exciting. One of our, the opportunities is obviously, as we develop these things, we also need to apply all of the rules that we talked about earlier about doing the job in the correct way, in the safe way so that we have to do this. But it's largely, it's about a dialogue between an architect or a, maybe a committee with that house of faith about, what are their desires? What are they trying to communicate with these aesthetically specific levers and poles and locking sets? So that piece of it, I find very exciting is the dialogue between what it is that they want to have so that they can have a unique expression on the, typically at least on the entries to their buildings, if not all of the doors within. So that's really exciting. I think, in the recent history, the idea of companies are now able to offer these kind of limited customized products as a way to differentiate ourselves from competitors to be able to rapidly ideate and create something that's special for you. And you'll see that in lots of other markets for like where people can go and customize a pair of running shoes online that's only one is made for you in that color combination. And we're able to do the same thing here with a lot of the tools that we use, a scanners, 3D printing, sometimes even 3D printing the product themselves. We have some of those capabilities as well. It allows us to rapidly ideate and create custom solutions for customers. And as creative people, we have our ability to create within our own imagination. But when we are collaborating with architects around the country, around the world, the opportunities are infinite. So that's very exciting to us. And as a team, we learn a lot from this that we can even apply on projects for products that are more the ones taken from a catalog. Because we refine our knowledge about the craftsmanship. I choose to use this word because it's something that we create. And we actually sharpen our skills when we are doing this. And our internal knowledge as a team. That's right. I mean, and to go just a little bit deeper on that, I would say that the primary set of products that we sell as opposed to the custom, a fair portion of our efforts is to make it, make these products efficient to manufacture so that it can be polished in a standard way, in an efficient way that the coatings and platings of things are using like common geometries and common parts. And to your point, as we do these things, we start to realize that actually we can do some of these things in better ways than it might not have been the obvious approach. But we come to appreciate that. And yeah, it's a good way to stretch. Yeah, it's a good way to push our boundaries and to grow. Yes. Well, thank you so much for joining us again. Thank you. Thank you for having us here. Yeah, that was very good. If you want to see examples of design, I will put a link below for the Good Design Studio. I'm also going to include links for Asa Aboy Global as well as some Asa Aboy Local Sites and some industrial design links if you want to learn more if you're curious about what you've heard today. Thanks for watching.