What’s one trend that really excites you?Ĭombining new technologies with traditional manufacturing is the key to innovation for me. From there it’s all about working with the many partners we have developed in manufacturing over the past 20 years. We do this with exhaustive alternative solutions until a hero jumps out at us. Once we have an objective list on paper on what our mutual goals are, we generally move pretty fast. That means to focus more on what they mean than what they say. Our job is to “creatively listen” to our inventive clients. Last hour reserved for the email firehose before heading home or hanging out in Pullen Park. You never know who is going to walk in… Conference call usually sneaks in somewhere, then ideally another bout of concentration/creative time before the day ends. Afternoon brings in foot traffic to our retail store front. Walk to lunch with my wife every day and then another jaunt with our dog who works with us. ![]() Quick team-sharing of today’s fires, and if lucky, into concentration time before lunch. Our workspace at Designbox is shared with other creatives, so the work day usually starts with a weird or inspiring or hilarious story from somebody. ![]() Wake up and get a scope on the day with some Impress coffee! Breakfast time with wife and young son generally involves music and some form of dancing. It’s nice to have this new source of income and see how it changes our view of customer service. The Impress has allowed us to put many of our insights and theories to work. We are now in full launch of the Impress as well, selling through e-commerce to people around the country and learning what it takes to extend that globally. Our primary source of income has been design innovation services for large brands. After three years of experiments we ended up with the final Impress design, with some great intellectual property behind it. Of course brewing coffee is quite different than steeping tea, but it got us thinking. Customers immediately started asking us to create a Teastick for coffee. ![]() It garnered a lot of attention and exposure from it’s unique design and ease of use combined with the high quality cup of tea it can steep. Years ago, we designed The Teastick, a single-cup tea infuser for loose leaf teas. Where did the idea for the Impress come from? Several improvements and line extensions have already been suggested by this amazing community and we’re now working to bring those to life. We were actually able to meet our forecasted timeline of initial production and fulfillment. We had a great Kickstarter campaign for the Impress Coffee Brewer and are now in commercialization. Fulfillment from that campaign was completed ahead of schedule and the Impress launched to consumer markets in late spring 2013. Most recently, his team has also successfully funded a new coffee brewer and technology called the Impress on the crowd-funding platform, Kickstarter. The company was seed-funded by Cherokee Investments Group in 2012. Lyf fuses technology with just-in-time assembly at the retail shop, and eliminates adhesives in order to achieve a new standard in sustainability. ![]() As a result he has garnered significant attention as a voice for the creative community, leading to lectures worldwide.Īs an Eisenhower Fellow for 2012, Aly has met with top leaders in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines to explore the connection between creativity, innovation, design, and manufacturing and the impacts of those efforts on SME development and global partnerships.Īly and his wife Beth founded Lyf Shoes in 2012 to put their latest patent to work. Additionally, he founded and leads SPARKcon, the nation’s largest open source festival that promotes local creative culture. His collaborations have garnered more than 16 patents, been nominated for a Grammy Award and exhibited in the Louvre.Īly is a co-founder of Designbox, a leading multi-disciplinary workspace of creative professionals. Trained as both an engineer and a designer, Aly has traveled extensively for 19 years to manufacture sporting goods design and technologies. His firm, Gamil Design, has specialized in invention development and launched products for some of the most exciting sports brands in the world. To do something big you have to start at the ground level yourself so you can appreciate what really needs to be done as things scale up.Īly Khalifa is addicted to inventive culture.
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