As an industrial designer, my work bridges research, design, and implementation to create measurable impact—from repurposing pandemic steel waste into a best-selling product, to improving manufacturing efficiency, to designing for life-and-death scenarios with first responders.

As the Rogue Fitness 2022 Product Development Intern, I was tasked to repurpose over 6 tons of excess steel that was collecting dust on the factory floor. I worked with the machinists and engineers to design, prototype, and release the Rogue Stainless Straight 20” and 40” Lat Bars (currently patent pending). Within the first year of production, all of the steel was eaten up and the stainless straight lat bars generated 40% of lat bar revenue with a 1% return rate.

The next summer, Rogue rehired me as the Product Management Intern. I implemented major design updates- sleeves with a tighter spin and a quieter drop - to Rogue’s two flagship barbells: the Ohio and the Bella Bar. I worked on the factory floor, prototyped barbell sleeves, and piloted production runs. I increased barbell product production by 25% by performing time studies and piloting a new gauging process.

Chosen from hundreds of international finalists, I won a 2024 Core 77 Design Student Award (Commercial Equipment category) for the PullTag, a triage tag re-designed for first responders to use during mass casualty responses. I surfaced the opportunity to redesign the triage tag after I gathered insights through co-design research with the Columbus Fire Department. I conducted interviews, facilitated two co-design research sessions, toured fire stations, and shadowed a mock mass casualty training at the Columbus Airport. The PullTag is purposefully designed low-tech, because the firefighters wanted a tag with fewer points of failure and needed to eliminate writing in the field.

Let’s discuss how I can combine my passion for product design and business strategy development to help startups become viable businesses.