Mako Design + Invent

Mako Design + Invent is a full-service consumer product development firm that focuses on providing services to small product businesses, early-stage invention startups and home inventors. The company is a 25-person team that runs across four offices (Austin, Miami, and Toronto). Each Mako Design + Invent office comes equipped with in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. In addition to its main services, the company is dedicated to helping its clients from the start of their product design inventions all the way to mass manufacturing. Mako Design + Invent offers additional help through providing professional resources such as patent referrals, as well as strategy, marketing, sales, and distribution connections for all consumer product categories. 

Since founded in 1999, Mako Design + Invent has been fully dedicated to focusing on helping, assisting, and providing specialized services to small businesses and startup inventors. The company was built from the ground up with no financing or debt and is now known as one of the leading physical product design and development firms across North America. Its journey has mainly focused on continuously providing exceptional, high-quality services to the clients whilst aiming at expanding services and offices to a worldwide scale.  

Mako Design + Invent is well on its way to opening more offices through out the US and Canada, and is always on the lookout to recruit talented world-class designers to join its passionate team. Its journey as a company also extends to further encouraging the education and innovation of the tech and product design industry through partnerships, sponsoring, and taking part in events within the design and tech community. 

Visionary Leadership 

Kevin Mako, the president and founder of Mako Design + Invent, is a dedicated and passionate entrepreneur with visionary goals and missions for what he continuously strives to plan to accomplish within the design, tech, and entrepreneurial industry. Through Mako Design + Invent, Kevin has spent his career focused on servicing small businesses and home inventors by providing the means towards high quality and world-class industrial design and product design services. He has worked with over 1000 entrepreneurs to help them build successful businesses.  

In addition to his business ventures, Kevin is a naturally talented and charming public speaker and has given countless lectures at events, conferences, and schools worldwide on widespread topics encompassing entrepreneurship, business, startups, tech, product design, and innovation. With a passion to inspire and motivate young inventors, entrepreneurs and students, Kevin has taken multiple initiatives to give back to the community. A primary example of his work giving back to the community is the Mako Student Awards that awards students $10,000 every year for their brilliant innovative business ideas.  

Notably, Kevin has won numerous awards and nominations throughout his career for his hard work within the design industry, such as Entrepreneur magazine’s Entrepreneur 360 award, Inc magazine’s Inc 5000 award, Growth 500, and Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award nomination. 

Customizing the Product and Consumer Design Market   

In general, Mako Design + Invent caters towards the product and consumer design market. As a company, it also likes to cater towards innovation and tech as it pushes the boundaries toward an exceptional and quality design that it produces for its clients. Within catering towards the product and consumer design industry, the company acknowledges the fact that the product market industry is a fast, competitive, and continuously evolving field where innovation and technology are constantly thriving.  

Mako Design + Invent helps to progress and cater to this industry by giving the best possible resources, opportunities, and services that smaller businesses, inventors and companies need in order to step into the world of the product design and consumer market and thrive. Thus, the company’s clients benefit from its services by receiving the needed support and a step-up into professional services that level out the “playing field” within the competitive design industry.  

Driving Innovation Through Quality Services and Strategic Alliances  

Mako Design + Invent is dedicated towards specifically providing high class and quality services to home inventors, startups, and small businesses that make the company unique and innovative and one of the first product design and development firms in North America.  

Mako Design + Invent is a company that prides itself in innovating and progressing the design industry by giving the opportunity and right stepping-stones to success to smaller establishments, communities, and students. The company not only helps to diversify who is part of the design industry but encourages growth, innovation and progression to future inventors and younger generations. This makes sure that the future of the design industry stays creative, fresh, and most importantly, accessible to them.  

The ways that Mako Design + Invent has taken strong initiatives to help push innovation within the design industry is through partnerships and sponsors. The company has been a long-time sponsor of the popular invention show Make48 and has partnered with Frito-Lay for ‘Dreamvention’. The project helps to inspire and encourage young inventors whilst working alongside big names such as Cobie Smulders to motivate and innovate the design community and industry as a whole. 

Thriving Beyond Challenges 

Some of the major challenges that Mako Design + Invent has faced until now revolve around creating the clearest form of communication between its designers and clients. As an initial step, the company does a feasibility of the design and engineering aspect to help its clients get a clear understanding of the final design. Since some of its clients are home inventors or startups, they have clear ideas and visions about how they envision their product to look, feel and function. However, due to technicalities in the engineering of the product –be it mechanical, electrical, etc. – some of the visions and ideas the clients have cannot be realized. So, the company’s challenge revolves around explaining the scope and feasibility of the product designs and offering better alternatives to create a successful product which fully satisfies their vision and requirements. 

Prestigious Business Honors and Recognition  

Along Mako Design + Invent journey as a company, it has been recognized not only for both its design work within the product and industrial design field, but also as a growing and innovative company. The company has been nominated and won awards from numerous notorious design awards such as the Red Dot Awards, the German Design Awards, Indigo Design Awards, Creativepool Design Awards, Lux Life Awards, and the London International Awards.  

Some of its best work that Mako Design + Invent has done for clients has resulted in not only creating products that are now performing exceedingly well for their small businesses but also within the product design market as its designs have won creative, innovative and best design top awards. In terms of awards that it has received as a company, Mako Design + Invent has won awards from Growth500, Inc. 5000, and Entrepreneur360, and has been recognized as being one of the top fastest-growing and innovative companies in Canada and the United States. 

An Extra Mile Towards Future 

As Mako Design + Invent is a company with strong visions and dedicated goals, it envisions the future of the company to become one of the top and iconic leading product development firms, not only in North America, but worldwide. Mako Design + Invent hopes to continue to help push forward and progress the design industry through giving a pedestal towards the bright ideas that stem from small businesses and home inventors and giving more back to the community of passionate designers, innovators and inventors through events, content, more partnerships and sponsors. In addition to being a leading company in tech and design, Mako Design + Invent sees itself encouraging growth in the industry by becoming an educational go-to resource that students, designers, entrepreneurs, and inventors worldwide can trust and rely on as a leading innovation and technology “hub” and product design firm.