Brandi is the Co-owner of Carter McGuyer Design Group and “Branded” Clothing, a retail store for girl’s clothing in Florence, AL. When not running the store, Brandi handles the business side of operations for her husband Carter McGuyer, an industrial designer whose works are featured in several retail locations, most notably in Crate and Barrel. Whether it’s drafting ideas in a kickoff meeting or flying to China to examine prototypes, Brandi and Carter work tirelessly to bring beautiful and functional household items to your home. You probably already own some!
Transcript
I'm Brandi McGuyer. I'm the co-owner of Carter McGuyer Design Group and a retail clothing store, Branded. We're talking industrial design, which is very unique and we are one of two in the state of Alabama. We do product design, which we start from an ideation, from a sketch and we take it to prototyping all the way to manufacturing, packaging and into store shelves. If you were to go to Crate and Barrel's website my husband is actually a feature designer on their website and we were very fortunate enough to work with them and do a Carter McGuyer kitchen. We did a really good product for Microplane which is known for their graders. We did a spiral cutter and it sold millions. It was a great product. That's one of my favorites because we're hired to help people with their bottom line. If our products don't sell, we don't get rehired. Because of the marketing background that I have and the design background my husband has, we can go and tell you this is a great retail price, you need to be at this price, this is great for packaging and this is what you need to sell, this is the whole package. We have a kickoff meeting and we go over their project parameters and then we kind of go back as a group, as a company and lay out our plan and we itemize like when can this be done, what dates can we hit and then we give them a timeline back, so sometimes we can get things done in nine months, sometimes it needs to take 12 months, sometimes it may take 24. It depends on how many items that we're doing, it depends on Chinese New Year, it depends on if they're getting it manufactured in the US, Mexico, a lot of things come into play when you're looking at a timeline. I do most of the critical project management, so I'm organizing and giving proposals, timelines and like helping steer things, just organization is really what I do. I fight fires all day long, put out fires. He's more of the the creative and I'm more of the business, it's the yin and the yang for the company.
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