Product Development

Innovation Coaching

Consumer Ethnography

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What We Do

Product Development

Design Craft. Design Thinking.

We bring teams from concept to prototype in the time most of your competitors take to complete a deck. We’ve been practitioners – and teachers – of design thinking for the past ten years. We’ve also spent years sweating pixel-level detail for products and experiences that millions of people use each day.

Innovation Coaching

Experiential Learning. Developing Capabilities.

Meaningful learning experiences don’t just happen – they are designed. We’ve created learning experiences within academia as well as within industry. As a result, we're able to combine the most leading-edge pedagogical methods with the pragmatism required by a fast-paced organization.

Consumer Ethnography

Real lives. Rigorous Empathy.

We meet people where they live, work, play, and shop. We meet them with open and inquisitive minds – and more than a bit of training in the human sciences – in order to flesh out a nuanced understanding of complex attitudes and behaviors. We ask the right questions, draw meaningful insights from the answers, and help you chart a course forward.

About Us

We Believe

People make sense. We respect their stories.
Strategy is best communicated through prototypes.
There’s a time for rough and a time for polish.
Innovation rarely happens within our comfort zone.
The work should be fun, even when it’s tough.

Our Team

Tom Maiorana

Founder / Designer

Tom got his start over 15 years ago, and has worked in a variety of design roles, from Interaction Designer, to Creative Director and Design Strategist. He’s been part of boutique design firms (he’s even founded a few – in addition to Red Cover, he helped found Kicker Studio).

Tom’s been on the client side as well. He spent four years at Intuit, two in a business unit where he brought work from concept to production, and two years in the Design Innovation Group where he connected long-term business strategy to current customer needs.

He is also the co-founder of Hummus Apparel and a guest lecturer at the d.school.

He has an MFA in Design from Stanford University.

Vida Mia García, Ph.D.

Ethnographer / Moderator

As an ethnographer and qualitative research associate, Vida Mia has worked with client teams across the retail, beverage, CPG, and social media industries throughout the U.S. and internationally. She’s led deep dives, run focus groups, and conducted in-store intercepts on projects ranging from comm checks & package evals to consumer profiling to identifying & innovating against category white space.

Before joining the world of consumer insights, Vida Mia received her doctorate from Stanford University.

She is a RIVA-trained moderator and a frequent guest speaker at the Honors Colloquium for Stanford’s Anthropology Department.