Humanscale: Engineer from Toy Industry Disrupts Office Sector
There are many ways thinking outside the box can be good for business, including, as Humanscale CEO Bob King will attest, hiring from outside the industry. Last year, he hired the company’s first Chief Marketing Officer from the luxury beauty industry. Leena Jain, former L’Oreal VP of Marketing for nail polish brand essie, has since propelled the brand’s marketing image, bringing new ideas and a fresh perspective on the luxury market to the office and commercial interiors sector.
King’s newest hire, David Wong, takes the helm as Humanscale’s new Vice President of Product Development in Engineering. He joins the company following a lustrous 18-year career with Fisher Price, where his engineering expertise led to the development of the 5th and 10th anniversary editions of Tickle Me Elmo, Follow Me Thomas and Learn Through Music. He brings with him the principles he learned at Fisher-Price, which elevated intrinsic play, ingenuity, action and strong construction. He believes these principles are synergistic with the work he’ll be performing at Humanscale, a company dedicated to getting people moving a work and making functional products that are built to last and that solve problems as simply as possible. Wong hopes to take the ideas behind encouraging activity for children and apply them to an inherently adult environment, maintaining that sense of play where it makes sense to do so. In his free time, Wong is an adjunct professor of Materials and Safety in the Toy Design Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
In hiring from the toy industry rather than from within the office industry, King hopes the engineering team at Humanscale will benefit from Wong’s diverse insights. While acknowledging that many of the materials and processes are similar, the main takeaway that he brings from the toy industry is a commitment to providing a lasting positive experience for customers. “Humanscale has an incredible design aesthetic and as we continue to grow into a more mature brand one of the things that I would like to do as a relative outsider is to identify, what are the things that influence the customer’s experience with a product and how to make that experience even more positive,” he says. “All powerful brands elicit a thought, an emotion, a feeling or a memory. Ultimately my hope in this role is to ensure that people continue to associate Humanscale products with positive experiences, knowing that they don’t just look great, but that they’re reliable and work well.”
From toys to task chairs, David is a disrupter to watch.
