I met Thomas when we were both taking Seth Godin’s altMBA. We were put on back to back projects and quickly bonded as we were both connected to Japan!

In this podcast we sat down together to talk about:

Feeling at home outside your home country.
Starting an interdisciplinary design consultancy
His first project – spending years developing a women’s jacket and learning how to scale a product.
“I want the bag that papa designs” – making the Sefu Nintendo Switch bag for his son.
Working with Japanese translators and making sure it sounds native to Japanese people (this is super important).
Doing the altMBA while working every day with factories in Vietnam to get the Switch bag ready.
The three kinds of feedback – Fluff, Directional and Perspective Changing.
Breaking even on a product is a success. By the time the marketing campaign is over, a whole group of new people will know who you are – you’ll have built trust.
If you’re going to market something you need to go big, because the price to market something small scale is much more as a percentage than marketing something on a bigger scale.
Testing ideas anecdotally and seeing people’s reactions, and tradeoffs in design.