Unless otherwise approved, client identities are held confidential. Engagement outcomes are described in the range we delivered — verified in supplier quotes, shipped parts, or engineered redesigns.
The product was finished, tooled, and had been shipping for years, but its profit margins were pinched. The client needed a path back to healthy margins without reopening the industrial design or forcing heavy requalification through the manufacturer.
We respected what was working and tackled what wasn't. Rather than re-specifying every part, we focused on the components where meaningful cost was hiding. Packaging was reworked end-to-end with chargeable-weight as a core cost-down target. The product that comes out the other side looks the same, feels the same, and ships with a fraction of the cost.
Mechanical and electrical part count reduced where cost was hiding. Assemblies simplified. Materials and processes pressure-tested against the function they actually needed to perform.
Box geometry and internal structure rebuilt against the new product envelope, cutting chargeable weight in half.
Production was happening. The internal team had been working for months to bring down the cost. Negotiations with suppliers had reached a point where each additional dollar was harder to find than the last, and the prevailing view was that the floor had been hit. It hadn't.
The unlock was the rigorous should-cost methodology the team had developed at SpaceX — material, process, labor, tooling, and margin decomposed with enough fidelity to hold up across the table from suppliers who'd heard every argument before. Iteration on negotiation tactics and packaging density alongside that model is where the savings came from.
First-principles cost model built at component and assembly level, used as the negotiation basis across active suppliers. Iterated across multiple rounds.
Box and pallet geometry reworked to improve units-per-shipment math without changing product protection performance.
Cost pressure was real, but the prevailing view internally was that the logistics program had no room to cut. Packaging and freight were uncontrolled and arbitrary — significant cost sitting in a lack of specification and shipping clarity. Suppliers were over-designing and over-packaging. Chargeable weight on inbound shipments was dramatically high compared to actual payload.
We ran packaging simulations to bring chargeable weight down. Pareto analyses surfaced the biggest cost-drivers. Physical studies and vibration, shock, and ship-test cycles verified that each proposed cost-down held up before it went live.
Outer dimensions reduced to match actual product envelope. Internal packing and protective material revised to cut dimensional-weight penalty without compromising protection.
Vibration, shock, and ship-test cycles run on proposed changes where the risk profile called for it — not a blanket requirement, but used to validate cost-downs before field deployment.
No deck, no hard sell. Just a direct review of your hardware — ideally a costed BOM plus CAD, specs, or samples — and a straight answer on whether we think there's cost to pull out.
Request Free Assessment →