Every New Year, novelty glasses shaped like the upcoming year make an appearance. The year 2020 (with two zeroes) lent itself to the ideal design for these novelty glasses — the cutouts for the wearer’s eyes would fit perfectly inside each zero.
Inspired by Emoji Masks and Nathan Fielder, I devised my own interpretation: New Year’s glasses where the zeros were blocked off and instead, the wearer peered out of each “2”. I felt that other people might find my intentionally ridiculous product as funny as I did, and realized that there was a small opportunity to sell these humorous novelty glasses.
I was eager to be responsible for the entire product development process: iterating on designs for a product, manufacturing it, and bringing it to market. After approximately ten design revisions, I settled upon two sheets of thick card stock, laser cut to different profiles laminated together to form the product. Knowing I would need to make these myself, the design revolved around reducing the number of operations and keeping cost down. After a long day in my university’s laser cutting lab, I made more than 200 sets of glasses. With the final product in hand, I developed and launched a simple website to market the final project.
It went viral and sold out almost immediately.
This project was not only a lot of fun, but it also exposed me to important factors of a product design business, from designing for manufacturability, to cost savings, to shipping considerations, to the importance of marketing.
