MAKO Design Wins Coveted Red Dot Award for Concept Design with ROVER Packhopper!

At our product design studio in Austin, Texas, we are constantly striving to drive the field of product design forward, and this means providing world-class, high-quality designs to our clients that push the boundaries of modern innovation.

Receiving design awards for our work not only affords recognition for our contributions to the design community as an active organization and our clients for their inventive ideas but also allows us to celebrate our talented team members for the hard work and effort they put into their projects every day.

The MAKO Design team is extremely excited to share that our design of the ROVER Packhopper has won a coveted Red Dot Award in the Design Concept category!

You can see the ROVER Packhopper LIVE now on Red Dot’s online exhibition! Check it out here.

Check out our award acceptance speech given by our CEO and Founder, Kevin Mako! 

About the Red Dot Award

The Red Dot Design Awards is an internationally renowned award competition founded in 1991 by Prof. Dr. Peter Zec. Red Dot Awards are annually given to those who strive to distinguish their business activities through design.

The awards are awarded by a carefully selected panel of judges who excel and are widely recognized in the areas of product design, communications design, and design concepts. This jury honors the award through the principles of both selection and presentation. There are three different disciples of the Red Dot Award, which are: Product Design, Communications Design, and Design Concept.

About the ROVER Packhopper

The ROVER Packhopper is a sports, fitness, and recreational product invention developed at our product design studio in Austin, Texas, for our client, Eric Coffman! It was designed to streamline practice sessions for tennis players and fans of the sport.

Eric’s inspiration for the ROVER Packhopper was to create a way to make it easier to carry everything you need to practice and allow the user to have optimally efficient tennis matches. The ROVER Packhopper is essentially a backpack that is able to hold up to 85 tennis balls and features a large pocket for racquets, numerous small pockets for accessories, and mesh pockets for water bottles.

Thanks to the extendable legs we’ve included in the design, it has the unique ability to raise tennis balls to the exact height needed to work on your serve with minimal delay. The Packhopper is also easy to carry and can be wheeled around tennis courts and across other terrains.

If you want to watch yourself serve or practice, the ROVER Packhopper can even hold your phone for you through a handy compartment that allows you to film yourself practicing, making it possible to monitor progress and identify flaws in technique.

The MAKO Design team at our product design studio in Austin, Texas, is a big fan of taking on projects that involve developing a project with numerous capabilities. When Eric approached us with the idea for the ROVER Packhopper, the team was incredibly excited to start the design process and figure out how the product could be built to provide such a wide range of functionalities.

The mechanical design and engineering for this project were spearheaded specifically by our Director of Design, Tim Uys, and one of our Senior Industrial Designers, Paul Davis. Collaboratively, they created the internal and external 2D and 3D CAD files, as well as the schematics for the design.

After meticulously reviewing the design concept, researching materials, and completing product execution with Eric, MAKO Design immediately began to work on outsourcing the right material so they could start building the initial prototype for the Packhopper!

Learn more about the ROVER Packhopper in its very own spotlight blog here!

Also, check out the ROVER Packhopper’s other award achievements, such as its wins in the MUSE Design Awards and DNA Paris Awards!

The entire MAKO team at our product design studio in Austin, Texas, would like to once again extend a very large thank you to Red Dot for acknowledging our industrious efforts with the prestigious award. We’d also like to give huge thanks to our talented team members who worked on the project, our Director of Design, Tim Uys, and our Senior Industrial Designer, Paul Davis.

We couldn’t be prouder as a product design firm to receive such a distinguished award from an organization with an enduring history of recognizing and appreciating exceptional design talent and innovators from around the world.

If you have a great new invention idea and you’d like to learn more about this process, get in touch with MAKO today and visit our website to find out more. Or feel free to give us a call at 1-888-806-MAKO, and we can set you up on a call with our product strategist!

About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!