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Most manufacturers with strong engineering sell the way they build. They open with output, durability, certifications and the test data that took years to earn, and they treat design as the finish on a product the engineering has already sold. Then a buyer standing in a dealer's aisle, or scrolling a product page, makes up their mind before reading any of it.
WHAT THE BUYER DECIDES BEFORE READING THE SPEC
The decision is fast. Research on retail shoppers puts the time a buyer spends in front of a shelf at 4 to 20 seconds, with decisions that are quick, instinctive and driven mainly by emotion [1]. A fleet manager or a parts buyer takes longer than a shopper, but in my experience the first impression forms just as quickly, and it is hard to undo once it has formed.
More and more of that first look happens on a screen. In the specialty-equipment market, 48% of sales start online [2]. On a product page, the specifications read alike, and what the buyer sees is a photo and a price. The engineering inside a product doesn't show in a thumbnail. Its form does.
A buyer judges quality from what they can see and touch: the proportions, the surfaces, the materials, the finish and the details. A crisp, heavy edge suggests the product will last. A precise, even finish tells the buyer it is well made. A shape that shows how the product mounts and what it does makes it easier to trust. Industrial designers work with exactly these signals, deliberately, so the form tells the buyer what the engineering has earned.
For an engineering team this can be hard to accept. The product's strongest advantages are on the inside: the electronics, the tolerances held in parts no one will ever see, the sealing that keeps it working for years. A buyer can't see any of that at the moment of choice, so the outside has to carry it.
DESIGN PREDICTS SALES
The link between design and sales shows up in the numbers. Jan Landwehr, Aparna Labroo and Andreas Herrmann added measures of car front designs to standard sales forecasting models and improved the forecasts by up to 19% [3]. How the front of a car looked helped predict how many of that car would sell.
Across whole companies the effect is larger. McKinsey tracked the design practices of 300 public companies and found that the companies in the top quarter grew revenue 32 percentage points faster than their industry peers over five years [4]. Those companies treated design as a leadership decision, measured as carefully as revenue and cost, and brought it into product development early.
For a manufacturer, industrial design is also one of the smaller costs of bringing a product to market, next to engineering and tooling. It is the cost that reaches the buyer first.
PROOF: A HEADLIGHT THAT HAD TO SELL ITSELF ON THE SHELF
JW Speaker is a third-generation family manufacturer in Germantown, Wisconsin. In 2016 it launched the first dynamically adaptive motorcycle headlights. Sensors measure how far the bike leans and switch on extra optics aimed into the inside of a corner, where an ordinary headlight, leaning with the bike, leaves the road dark.
The first models were round. Victory motorcycles use a diamond-shaped headlight, so JW Speaker developed a Victory version, the Model 8695, and asked us to design the one part every buyer sees first: the bezel around the light. The first goal in the brief, in JW Speaker's words, was "Appear as highest value." The brief also asked for the right character for the motorcycle and for a bezel that showed the value of the adaptive technology.
The problem will be familiar to any company with strong engineering. The technology proves itself at night, on a winding road. On a shelf, beside the stock lamp and other LED replacements, it has to show its value with the power off.
We started with hand sketches and moved to eighteen rendered concepts in three families. Every concept was fitted around JW Speaker's own optics, housing and lens, and stayed inside the existing tooling budget. JW Speaker's engineers marked up the printed concepts, we refined the direction they chose, and the production 3D models went to their engineers.
The bezel gives each set of optics its own sculpted frame. The openings around the banking optics step to follow their angle, so a buyer can see how the lean function works just by looking at the light. Chrome went on the surfaces the eye lands on first. A very fine texture went on the side walls beside the light, where a shiny surface would throw glare.
The headlight launched as the first dynamically adaptive headlight made for Victory's diamond shape. At its 2018 update it retailed at $529.95, near the top of a market where branded LED motorcycle headlights sell for $140 to $600 [5], and JW Speaker still sells it.
THE SAME RESULT IN JW SPEAKER'S OTHER MARKETS
The same thing happens in every market JW Speaker sells into. The product a buyer notices first is the one they pick.
HEAVY TRUCKS
Every 4x6 LED truck headlight fits the same opening, so the face is what a buyer can tell apart. For JW Speaker's Model 8800, we designed one face for all eight versions. The 8800 Evolution 2 is still sold by truck-parts dealers, and one owner who put heated black 8800s on his Peterbilt wrote: "I get tons of compliments and even more questions about them" [6].
MATERIAL HANDLING
Forklift parts catalogs group work lights into square, rectangular and round. For JW Speaker's Model 710, we designed a D-shaped housing with a faceted top and a lens that wraps around the front, so it stands apart from the lights beside it. JW Speaker still sells it, and its product page says it "outshines stock forklift lights" [7].
AGRICULTURAL AND OFF-HIGHWAY
For the concepts that led to JW Speaker's Model 93, JW Speaker had asked for "something unique." We designed the bezel rings, the fins and the center mount to work together, so two lamps read as one product. JW Speaker now sells the Model 93 for 13 uses, including agriculture, construction, motorcycles and rail [8].
WHAT WE LEARNED
THE FIRST LOOK DECIDES MORE THAN THE SPEC SHEET
Buyers in every one of these markets compare products that meet the same standard. The one they reach for is the one that looks like the better product. On the Victory headlight, the sculpted frames did the work the spec sheet couldn't do on a shelf.
A DISTINCT SHAPE GETS THE PRODUCT NOTICED IN A CROWDED ROW
Where a catalog or a dealer's wall groups products by shape, a product with a shape of its own is the one the eye stops on. The Model 710's D-shaped housing stands out from a page of squares and circles.
ONLINE, THE PHOTO IS THE FIRST LOOK
When nearly half of specialty-equipment sales start on a screen, the product photo does the job a shelf used to do. A design with a strong shape and clear details reads well even at thumbnail size. The Model 710's wrapping lens and the 8800's framed projectors are visible in a small photo, so the difference a buyer would notice in person still comes through on a product page. When you review a new design, look at it at the size a buyer will first see it online, not only full size on a monitor.
OWNERS SELL THE NEXT ONE
The 8800 owner who wrote about the compliments was telling other buyers that people notice his lights. A product that draws comments keeps selling after the first buyer has left the store.
WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR NEXT LAUNCH
Judge your next product the way the buyer will, in a few seconds, beside everything else on the shelf or the screen. Put a photo of it in a row with its three closest rivals and ask someone outside the company which one they'd pick, and why. If the answer is "the cheapest," the outside isn't yet showing what the inside can do. Bring industrial design in while the product can still change, alongside your engineers and inside the tooling the program already has.
See how industrial design helped JW Speaker sell more in each market: heavy truck, powersports, material handling and agricultural.
If you're planning your next launch, let's set up a 30-minute call to walk through your catalog and the product you're bringing to market.
Jon Levy, CEO, KAIA
REFERENCES
- PLMA, "No more than 20 seconds to influence a buyer." https://plma.com/article/no-more-20-seconds-influence-buyer
- Denise Aquino, "Report: Automotive Aftermarket's Future Is Online and In-Store," SEMA eNews, October 22, 2026. https://www.sema.org/news-media/enews/2026/43/report-automotive-aftermarkets-future-online-and-store
- Jan R. Landwehr, Aparna A. Labroo and Andreas Herrmann, "Gut Liking for the Ordinary: Incorporating Design Fluency Improves Automobile Sales Forecasts," Marketing Science 30, no. 3 (2011). https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ormksc/v30y2011i3p416-429.html
- Benedict Sheppard, Hugo Sarrazin, Garen Kouyoumjian and Fabricio Dore, "The business value of design," McKinsey Quarterly, October 25, 2018. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/prosper-and-growth/our-insights/the-business-value-of-design
- JW Speaker, "Adaptive 2 Motorcycle Headlights" (brochure pages), May 2, 2018, https://www.jwspeaker.com/wp-content/uploads/05-02-2018-JW-Speaker-Adaptive-2-Motorcycle-Brochure-Pages.pdf ; price range from Law Abiding Biker, LED headlight listings, https://www.lawabidingbiker.com/tag/led-headlights
- Raney's, "JW Speaker 4" x 6" LED Evolution 2 Projection Headlight Model 8800," with owner review, August 1, 2020. https://www.raneystruckparts.com/jw-speaker-4-x-6-led-evolution-2-projection-headlight-model-8800
- JW Speaker, "Warehouse LED Work Light, Model 710." https://www.jwspeaker.com/products/forklift-work-light-model-710/
- JW Speaker, "90mm LED Headlight, Model 93." https://www.jwspeaker.com/products/90mm-headlights-model-93/
