Hauser Creates Its Own Niche : Calabasas: Firm markets its mechanical engineering and electronics know-how to companies that lack their own industrial design staffs.
Eye surgeons step on its electronic foot pedal to power their automated hand tools. Computer buffs stare at its color monitors. Kids wash before dinner with its soap dispensers.
Although sold by different manufacturers, all these products were designed by S.G. Hauser Associates Inc., a Calabasas firm owned and led by Stephen G. Hauser. Hauser’s firm isn’t big--it’s annual revenue hovers around $2 million--but it ranks among the dozen best known industrial design companies in the nation.
Hauser Associates creates products ranging from high-tech portable malaria test kits to mundane bathroom cabinets. In its 26-year history, the firm has developed items for such corporate giants as Baxter International and Mattel Inc.
Several smaller companies headquartered in the San Fernando Valley, such as computer disk-drive maker Micropolis Corp. in Chatsworth and faucet producer Price Pfister in Pacoima, also have tapped the firm’s creativity.
Hauser Associates keeps busy because some companies don’t keep designers on staff. “We don’t have design people in-house,” said Larry Steiner, a senior product manager at Alcon Surgical Inc., which sells the surgeons’ foot switch Hauser designed.
Other corporations have their own designers, but often hire outsiders for certain products. Sometimes it’s because Hauser Associates has an expertise in specific areas (medical equipment, for instance) or because the corporation--knowing it will sell only limited volume of a product--will save cash by using Hauser Associates.
“They don’t want to burden their in-house engineers,” Hauser said. “But when we’re asked to do something, we have to be damn sure we can manage those areas of expertise.”
About half of Hauser Associates’ business involves medical products. Among its designs: the portable kit for examining malaria cells that’s now sold by medical-equipment giant Becton, Dickinson & Co., a kit that includes a microscope and a centrifuge that looks like a portable compact disc player.
Hauser said he designed the malaria kit “on a dare” after a friend, a Becton, Dickinson engineer, complained about the need for such a product in remote parts of the world. Hauser and his team built a prototype within a few weeks and, after showing it to Becton, Dickinson, “in two days we had an open-ended account not only to design it, but to set up an outfit in Los Angeles to build 1,100 of them.” The kit is molded from plastic and was kept in simple shapes to keep costs down.
The rest of Hauser Associates’ accounts are split between housewares (it’s done bicycle locks and voice-activated VCR controls), office equipment (small label printers, retail sale terminals) and sporting goods (golf irons and putters).
Even though the industrial design community knows Hauser Associates as one of the more established firms in the business, Hauser still has dozens of competitors and must constantly fight for attention.
Mike Nuttall, design director at IDEO Product Development in Palo Alto, which has six times the number of employees as Hauser Associates, said of the rival firm, “I know the name, but I couldn’t tell you who the individuals are who work there. The work of theirs I have seen is good, but they don’t seem to have a high visibility in the profession.”
But another of its big rivals said Hauser Associates has enjoyed a minor renaissance in recent years.
“For a while they were pretty stagnant as far as their creative work was concerned,” said Chris Alviar, senior industrial designer for ZIBA Design in Portland, Ore. “Then they infused themselves with new and fresh designers and they’ve come along well. Suddenly they’re visible again.”
What visibility Hauser Associates has earned stems partly from awards it’s won. Hauser’s foot switch, for instance, was named one of the best new product designs for 1989 by Business Week magazine. Over the past decade the firm also has won seven Industrial Design Excellence Awards, sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America and Business Week.
Trophies don’t pay the bills, though, and Hauser Associates can’t wait for clients to come knocking. “In the good old days we hardly came up against anybody,” said Hauser, who started his firm in a bedroom of his home. “Today we come up against the same excellent offices over and over again.”
Hauser Associates, which charges anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000 depending on the project, is required to do much more than draw a pretty picture. Frequently the firm must design an entire product and show the manufacturer how the product can be mass-produced at a profit.
Its offices include not only the computer-aided engineering and design equipment that make high-tech blueprints (which are actually multicolored), but also staging areas where prototypes made from cardboard and other materials are hand-built. That means Hauser’s 22 employees and six consultants also must understand mechanical engineering, electronics, semiconductors and the like.
“Most designers we have can run a lathe and a mill,” said Hauser, 55. “You can’t draw a sketch without knowing how the thing is built. If you don’t understand that, you end up being a stylist, and that’s useless.”
Case in point: the eye surgeon’s foot switch. Alcon Surgical, a unit of Swiss food giant Nestle SA, asked Hauser to redesign an old switch housed in a crude metal box that surgeons would awkwardly step on to activate hand tools used in cutting, flushing and other functions.
“It was just a box, it was awful,” Hauser said.
Hauser Associates developed a sleek pedal switch that enables doctors to rest their foot on the pedal without fear of accelerating the switch’s power when it’s not needed. The firm developed every part of the switch except its electrical components, he said.
The contraption doesn’t resemble your ordinary automobile pedal. This switch has a smooth, oversize pedal--remember, surgeons wear those bulky wraps around their shoes--that’s bounded on the right and left by raised guards to prevent a doctor’s foot from slipping off.
It’s that engineering know-how that Hauser tries to market. “There’s a lot of good offices, but there aren’t many able to offer the whole shot,” he said. But Hauser still runs into rivals such as IDEO, which likewise knows that such widespread knowledge “seems to be increasingly attractive to our clients,” Nuttall said.
In the end, a product’s looks still count even if its working parts are flawless, “but you don’t decide any issue based only on appearance,” Hauser said. “The market is looking to industrial designers not as artists any more, but as part of the team that is aware of marketing, engineering and all those specialty areas” involved in a product’s success, he said.
Hauser Associates’ long-term outlook, meanwhile, involves a plan for Hauser to eventually sell majority ownership of the firm to Ron Pierce, Hauser’s vice president. “I would like, when I get done here, to have some equity” remaining in the firm, Hauser said.
But the firm’s future also might include a merger with a firm that focuses on mechanical engineering or some other aspect of product development, so that Hauser Associates can keep offering a wide range of services, he said.
“I’ve been asked to merge with others in the past, but it was ID and ID,” he said, referring to proposals to merge his industrial-design firm with another. “That didn’t interest me. But there might be interest in merging with other specialties.”
