Santa Clara, California, United States
Kristina Lee-Smith has spent the past decade designing and developing consumer goods, with over 100 products brought to market. She spent 8+ years in the Shanghai office of Blockware LLC, a Sonoma, CA based company focusing on design & development of consumer goods, sold directly and through retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond, Great Useful Stuff, Rule#5 lifestyle brand, and GUShospitality.com. She brings ideas to life from napkin sketch to conception, prototyping and refinement, to partnering with factories for faithful production. Her approach integrates her American upbringing with her on-the-ground experience with China's manufacturing landscape and allows her to develop products that are valuable for the retailer and end user while being efficiently manufactured in China. This unique combination of deep Western market insight while working within the bounds of China's manufacturing industry has allowed her to successfully bring to market 100+ innovative solutions with many more in the works. She is co-inventor on 1 patent. Kristina was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and pursued the creative industry following in the footsteps of her grandfather - a painter and photographer. A graduate of California College of Arts and Crafts, she studied directly under Yves Behar. She is currently located in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is also interested in becoming a part (or starting) an organization to impact social change, and positively influence culture locally and globally. Specialties: Soft goods, development for production, usability, interaction, planning, branding, inventing, visual communication, sketching, ideation, innovation,
Training next-level home robots to learn human skills. Teach detailed interactions for the applied use of robotics for practical solutions to improve humankind's standard of living.
I worked on an internal project, designing form, CMF, fabricating multiple prototypes. Collaborated with team of engineers to make the vision and reality.
Founded social venture to provide reusable masks to those on front lines of pandemic: nurses, medical staff, assisted living centers, nursing homes, homeless services, indigenous peoples, marines. All funded through sales of masks and shirts, designed and produced in-house. Made in America.
Researched, developed, and designed over 50 products currently on the market. Her work has been featured on The Today show, Real Simple, Parade magazine, and more publications. This was achieved by meeting and working directly with clients, generating innovative concepts and ideas to suit their market needs while satisfying cost and manufacturing constraints. This process included research and analysis of trends and competitive products; ideation of product themes and solutions for end-user and client-proposed problems. Worked directly with sourcing partners in China to sample concepts and optimized relevant manufacturing and shipping processes. Visited factories to gain deeper understanding of material qualities, manufacturing processes in order to design for efficient mass manufacturing and use of materials. Presented concepts to clients in the US and collaborated on product solutions. This resulted in expansion of product lines, repeat orders, and closer relationship with clients. Also led team to develop branding, interaction design, and working with web developers to build several retail websites: GreatUsfeulStuff.com, RuleNumberFive.com, GUSHospitality, TowelsbyGUS.com.