↑

Fix the Design. Not the Production Line.

Most product development problems are not manufacturing problems.  They are design problems discovered too late.

By the time a cost-overrun notice or a slipped ship date lands on your desk, the real problem is usually months old — baked into an early design that never saw the factory floor. When design lives with one supplier and production with another, the gap between intent and reality widens at every handoff.

Work with an ODM that designs in-house and manufacturability gets engineered into the product as it’s drawn — not bolted on later, after the design is thrown over the fence and the email ping-pong begins.

Designers Who Know What Happens on the Production Floor

OSM’s design practice sits directly on top of our core capability: integrating engineered soft goods with electronics — audio, sensing, and the hybrid products in between.

That integration is harder than it looks. Soft goods move. Electronics don’t forgive movement. How a textile structure deforms under load, reacts to temperature, and shifts with repeated use dictates where components can sit, how cables route, and whether an assembly holds its position over the life of the product.

Take a fabric folio built for a technology brand to house AR glasses, a webcam, and antenna modules — a soft-goods construction that folds open and shut dozens of times a day and has to stay slim doing it. Position those antennas without accounting for thousands of fold cycles and they drift; when an antenna moves, signal degrades. Skip impact protection around the glasses housing and a single accidental drop cracks the optics inside. None of that is an assembly error. Each is an integration decision that wasn’t made at the design stage — and once tooling is locked, the fix is a redesign, not an adjustment.

At OSM, our Engineered Soft Goods and Electronics Engineering teams work under the same roof, on the same project, from day one. Each discipline’s constraints feed straight into the other’s decisions, so problems surface at the design stage — before tooling, before trials, before anything is locked.

That’s what cuts rework, compresses timelines, and delivers a stable product from the very first production run.

What Our Design Services Offer:

Design for Manufacturability: Fewer Revisions, Faster to Production

A design that can’t be built as drawn spins up revision loops, and every loop burns time and tooling spend. Design for Manufacturability (DfM) writes production constraints into the design from the first sketch. At OSM, that means our engineers pressure-test geometry, tolerances, component placement, and assembly sequence against our real production capabilities before anything is finalised. Start with DfM and you reach tooling sign-off in fewer rounds — because manufacturing reality is built into the design, not filtered in afterward.

Material Selection and Development: The Right Material from the Start

The wrong material costs you twice. First the obvious way: replacing stock that fails qualification or throws defects in trial production. Then the quiet way — batch-to-batch instability. Adhesion that won’t hold, dimensions that drift between runs, and durability gaps that only surface after months of use all trace back to material calls made without full production context. We specify materials against end-use demands and production method at the same time, so there are far fewer surprises when volume ramps.

Original Design with Customisation: A Proven Structure, Built to Your Brief

Entering a new product category from a blank page means validating every structural decision yourself — usually across several rounds of prototyping. OSM’s original designs hand you a different starting line: a structure already proven in production, ready to adapt to your brand, performance targets, and market positioning. You strip out the risk of building from scratch and still get a product made to your brief.

Design Engineering: Reduce Complexity, Improve Consistency

How a product goes together decides how consistently it performs, unit after unit. High part counts, awkward join sequences, and components that need manual alignment all introduce variation — and at scale, variation reads as inconsistent quality. Design Engineering at OSM strips that out: we rationalise components, simplify construction sequences, and design subassemblies that fit together the same way every single time. The result is a product that holds its quality across full production batches, not just across hand-built prototypes.

Why Integration Is the Real Differentiator

Run a separate design house and a separate manufacturer and you take on a coordination cost that’s easy to underestimate. A decision made without production input triggers a query to the factory. The query triggers a revision request back to the design house. The revision triggers a requalification cycle. Every loop adds weeks and cost — and you’re stuck in the middle, relaying messages between two suppliers who don’t share the same production knowledge.

At OSM, that loop doesn’t exist. Both teams belong to the same organisation, working the same project from day one. A decision that would take weeks to settle across two suppliers gets resolved in a single internal conversation.

We work with brands across a range of product categories, including:

  • Portable Audio e.g. Industrial and Consumer Headphones, ANC Headphones, Bluetooth Speakers, Radio Communication Systems
  • Personal Protection e.g. Advanced Hearing Protection Solutions
  • Hybrid solutions – Engineered Soft Goods with integrated electronics e.g. diagnostic pads, tracking devices, laptop covers with integrated speakers, antenna
  • Carry Solutions e.g. Travel Case, Carrying Laptop Bag, Backpack
  • Specialised Sports Gear e.g. Weighted Training Vests, Hydration Packs and Functional Accessories

If your product lives in one of these categories — or anywhere at the intersection of engineered soft goods and electronics — let’s talk about where design decisions are quietly building risk into your current development process.

About OSM Group

OSM Group was founded in Sweden in 2004. With strategically located production facilities in China and the Philippines and R&D in Stockholm, Hong Kong and China, we support leading brands worldwide with expertise-driven and reliable manufacturing solutions. Our vision is to deliver exceptional and sustainable products that strengthen our customers’ market competitiveness and long-term success. By combining Scandinavian heritage with a culture rooted in integrity, collaboration, and continuous improvement, we are committed to building enduring relationships based on trust and mutual growth.

Topics

Category

Discover More

Let's talk

X

Please write your message and contact information below. We will notify the right team, that will contact you as soon as possible.