Why the best design partner for your product might have never designed one like it.

There is a question that surfaces, reliably, at some point in almost every serious conversation about a design engagement. It arrives politely, sometimes almost apologetically, but it carries within it a conviction so deeply held that answering it directly is rarely sufficient. The question is some version of this: your portfolio says a lot, but have you ever designed a product in our category?

It is a reasonable question. It is also, in most cases, the wrong one.

What the question assumes

The logic behind it is intuitive. You are about to commit significant capital to a design engagement. You want evidence of competence. And the most legitimate form of evidence, the one that feels safest, is prior work in the same space. Someone who has designed ten smart rings knows how smart rings are made. Someone who has designed three massage guns understands the ergonomic and CMF constraints of handheld percussive devices. The mental model is: domain expertise reduces risk.

It does reduce a specific kind of risk. Execution risk. A design house with deep category experience will make fewer naive mistakes, ask fewer basic questions, and move faster throughout the early phases of a project. These are real advantages, and dismissing them entirely would be dishonest.

However: execution risk is [ undeniably ] not the risk that determines whether a product succeeds or fails in the market. That risk is something else entirely.

What sectorial specialisation actually produces

Every industry accumulates, over time, a set of conventions so deeply embedded that they cease to be visible as choices. They become the fluid in which everyone swims. In consumer electronics, it is the assumption that a premium product must feel heavier than their actual weight. In medical devices, it is the assumption that clinical aesthetics signal trustworthiness. In power tools, it is the assumption that colour is how you signal brand rather than function. When it comes to brand strategy, it is the preconception that shades of blue evoke technology. No one decided these things. They emerged from decades of incremental decisions, each one reasonable in isolation, each one reinforcing the last. And, what is even more pernicious, they instil a dangerous sense of certainty in those who inherit them.

A design firm that has worked exclusively within a category for years does not just know its conventions. It has internalised them. It designs within the constraints without seeing them as constraints. It optimises the product within an established space rather than questioning whether the space itself is the right one to be in.

This is not incompetence. It is the natural result of depth. But it produces a particular kind of outcome: a very good version of what already exists.

There is a moment in a conversation with a client that illustrates this with unusual clarity. The engagement involved a product in a category where Miio Studio had no prior work. In the first week of the project, before any concept had been drawn, a single observation about the category surfaced that the client's own team, despite years in the space, had never articulated. Not because they lacked intelligence, but because the observation required not knowing what everyone in the category had agreed to take for granted. That observation became the strategic foundation of the entire engagement. The product that resulted did not look like anything else in the category. That was not a stylistic choice but a commercial one.

What the uncontaminated eye actually produces

The disruptions that reshape product categories rarely come from within them. They come from people who look at a space and see what its inhabitants have stopped seeing. They ask the questions that insiders have already answered, so thoroughly and so long ago that asking them again seems naive. And in that naivety [ which is not ignorance but freedom ] they find positions that the category's established players cannot occupy because they are too invested in the conventions that define them.

This is not an argument for inexperience. An uncontaminated perspective without methodological rigour is simply uninformed. It produces interesting observations that go nowhere. What makes the combination rare and valuable is when the freedom from sectoral convention is held alongside the discipline to translate observations into commercial decisions, into CMF and touchpoint choices that communicate a price point, into structural decisions that survive DFM, into a formal language that the market has not yet seen but immediately acknowledges as right.

That combination does not come from working in one category for ten years. It comes from working across many categories, with the same rigorous methodology applied each time, accumulating not a library of category-specific solutions but a way of thinking that is genuinely portable.

The question worth asking instead

Before the question of category experience, there is a more important question. And it is harder to answer, which is why it is asked less often.

"Is this agency capable of seeing what my market has stopped seeing?"

Not: have they designed something like this before. But: can they look at my competitive landscape and identify the assumptions that everyone in it has accepted without realising they had a choice? Can they scrutinise what the category has made invisible to itself?

The answer to that question is visible in how a design agency talks about markets they have never worked in. In the observations they make in the first hour of a conversation. In the questions they ask before they begin sketching anything. In whether they are trying to understand your category or trying to understand your customer, your competitors’ customers, and the gap between the two.

A last thought

Every company, in every sector, across every industry, actively builds its own market blindness; by design.

The clients who have pushed Miio Studio the furthest, and whose products have performed the most durably in their markets, are rarely the ones who asked whether we had done it before. They are the ones who wanted to know how we think. They understood that the critical decisions we surfaced during an engagement were a direct reflection of how we think; and that understanding is precisely what they were buying. Not a library of previous solutions. Not category familiarity. A way of approaching a problem that their market had already decided how to solve, applied by people who had never accepted that decision as a final one.

If someone tells you that their agency has never designed a product like yours, that is not disqualifying information. Depending on what you are trying to build, solve or reveal, it might be the most insightful thing they could tell you.