Regency Fireplace Products

As part of the Regency Product Design Team, I aided in the designing and manufacturability of their fireplaces. This involved every aspect of the product design and manufacturing process including market research, user-experience research, sheet metal CAD design, DFMA, outsourcing parts, prototyping, and final manufacturing processes.

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As my introduction to product design for fireplaces, there was a steep learning curve to wrap my head around the manufacturing processes, international testing regulations, and internal processes within the company. 

As part of the line-up of accessories for the City Series Products, I spent time designing framing kits for each product, starting with 3 kits for the CB40 model. These kits needed to be quick and easy to assemble for the installer, as well as facilitate multiple finishing options, while ensuring a high level of quality, accuracy, and durability in the finished build.

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This project came with a lot of challenges to overcome as we had many goals we wanted to meet, some of which conflicted with one another. It was a challenging and time consuming project that, nonetheless, came together thanks to a great deal of creativity from our whole design team.

In my second year at Regency I was given the opportunity to lead the CAD and prototyping development of the Chicago Corner 40LE fireplace. While it was a relatively simple project - as it was a redesign of the previous Bay 40 unit - it came with a lot of its own unique challenges: It was the first 2-sided corner unit for the company and we had to work out a lot of kinks in testing to meet the safety standard for fireplace in Canada and the US. 

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This project came with to a lot of coordinating with multiple departments, and managing expectations from my superiors as complications arose. 

This project involved designing an entirely new product to the fireplace industry; a truly flush-mounted power vent system. 

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I was the only designer assigned to this project as it was a small product compared to a fireplace, however, it ended up being on par with some of the more involved units in regards to complexity. This lead to me taking courses in my own time to learn more about the physics behind thermal energy transfer and airflow dynamics. I was able to use this knowledge to analyse our test data and design an optimized product which no other company in the industry has been able to successfully manufacture and test.

This was the largest project I worked on while at FPI. I was given the opportunity to head the design and production of a new unit; the 72" version of the San Francisco Bay 40" unit. While initially it was supposed to simply be a re-hashing of the 40" unit, it quickly became a whole new project as the gas combustion physics didn't scale up as expected. 

I spent a lot of time in the lab with our technicians running tests and designing new prototypes based off of test data before we got to a functioning prototype.

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Managing expectations and giving progress reports was a large part of this project and instrumental in planning and negotiating the time necessary to come up with a good product.

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