Our Services

Turning a great idea into a commercial reality requires balancing vision, capital, and execution. We provide end-to-end physical product development; offering the strategic direction, industrial design and mechanical engineering needed to take your concept from a napkin sketch to global shelves.

Product Strategy

De-risking your investment before capital meets tooling.

Leveraging over 20 years of hardware experience, we partner with ambitious companies and founders to guide physical products from early concepts through to global launch. By establishing clear development roadmaps and focusing your resources on solving the right user problems, we provide the clarity needed to make informed decisions and build products designed to succeed internationally.

Product Design & Engineering

Seamless hardware execution where beauty meets manufacturability.

We integrate human-centered industrial design with rigorous mechanical engineering from day one. This unified approach eliminates the disconnect between aesthetics and function, ensuring what you approve on screen is achievable and will be as close as possible to what gets produced at the factory.

Industrial Design

A truly great product creates an immediate emotional connection. That reaction is engineered through deep empathy, smart ergonomics, and an obsessive attention to detail. We take your core technology and solve hidden user frustrations. We transform functional hardware into a human-centered products that delight your users, sets you apart from your competitors, and elevates your entire brand.

Concept & Vision: Form exploration, 3D sketching, and physical brand identity.
User Experience & Ergonomics: Empathy research, physical interaction, tactile feedback, prototyping and user testing.
Design Systems & CMF: Design Language System to ensure brand consistency across your product line, alongside complete Color, Material, and Finish (CMF) specifications.

Mechanical Engineering

We engineer your product to withstand whatever the real world throws at it, without compromising the design intent. By balancing structural strength, internal layout, and environmental protection from day one, we deliver hardware engineered for long-term field reliability.

Internal Architecture & Mechanisms: Custom enclosure design, internal component layout, clips, latches, electrical integration, cable routing, keypads, and user interfaces.
Environmental Protection: Waterproofing (IP sealing), thermal management, and impact resistance.
Reliability & Stress Testing: Structural validation, accelerated life testing, ingress, cyclic testing, and drop/impact testing.

Design for Manufacture (DFM)

A great design is meaningless if it cannot be produced reliably and cost-effectively at scale. DFM is where project risk is eliminated. We streamline your route to the factory floor without compromising quality, ensuring a smooth handoff whether manufacturing locally or offshore.

Production CAD & Drawings: Tooling-ready 3D CAD (draft, wall thickness, split lines, shut-offs) and 2D engineering drawings with GD&T tolerances.
Factory Handoff & Tooling Support: Comprehensive vendor packages, direct communication with moulders/manufacturers, and tooling approach review.
Quality Control & Assembly: Assembly process mapping, critical dimension inspection documentation, and custom quality-control test jigs.

About

Led by principal designer Carl Menary, Formativ brings a broad, highly integrated skillset across industrial design, mechanical design, and DFM. Operating through an agile consultancy model, Carl leads the core strategy and design while scaling technical capacity through a trusted network of specialist engineers, researchers, designers, and manufacturing partners tailored to your exact needs.

Portfolio

Carl is a Wellington-trained industrial designer with over 20 years of experience taking products from early concept through to production, bridging industrial design and mechanical design for manufacture.

For 15 years Carl worked in design consultancies worldwide, including an 8-year tenure at 4ormfunction, leading mechanical design, CAD modelling, prototyping and engineering across a range of consumer and industrial products, including work for Les Mills International on the multi-award winning Gen2 Smartbar.

Carl led the industrial design of the patented Smart Measure Pro for Stanley Black & Decker (with ikeGPS), taking it from concept to manufacture within a 9-month timeline.

At Yamaha Agriculture (formerly Robotics Plus), Carl led the industrial design of all their products, and (among many other projects) led the mechanical design of the rotationally moulded exterior panels and spray tank systems for the Prospr and Q-Series autonomous orchard sprayers. Products that helped the company win market share in the orchard robotics market. He also spent several years as the design team manager, leading a team responsible for marketing, product manuals, training materials, industrial design and prototyping.

Carl is known for translating user and service needs into robust, manufacturable product requirements that exceed expectations, work that has helped his clients win multiple design awards and patents. He brings particular strength in DFM, prototyping, and production implementation, across plastics and design for assembly.