Only a few months ago, the VAVA Voom became Amazon’s #1 New Release in Bookshelf Speakers and #1 New Release in Surround Sound Systems. Well, we’ve been keeping busy and now we’re proud to announce our Bluetooth speaker’s most recent accolade: winner of the Red Dot Award: Product Design 2016!
None of this would have been possible without our designer, Wai-Loong Lim, who is no stranger to the Red Dot Design Award. See what he has to say about the VAVA Voom’s recent success:
TEAM VAVA
Congratulations! Including the VAVA Voom, this is now the third time you’ve won a Red Dot Design Award. How do you feel?
WAI-LOONG LIM
It’s always an honor to win such a prestigious award! As you know there are thousands of competitors so for us to win is very cool, especially since this is a first for us: the Voom is VAVA’s first product, and it’s the first product I designed for VAVA! I can only hope this win will also be the first of many to come.
TEAM VAVA
What is different / special about this win with the VAVA Voom?
WAI-LOONG LIM
The win for the VAVA Voom is especially significant because I also helped create the brand and model name, so you can say I’m very integrated into the product development process.
TEAM VAVA
What are some challenges you faced when designing the VAVA Voom?
WAI-LOONG LIM
The integral part of our design process, which we call Culture-driven Design, is that we look beyond the user to focus on the surrounding environment and lifestyle in order to deliver a solution that is Useful, Beautiful and Meaningful. For the VAVA the particular challenge is to deliver high audio quality at a value pricing while maintaining great design. Working with the factory and management team, we went through many iterations and realized that, like many successful products, less is really more. If you look at the Voom, you can see that it’s a timeless design consisting of very few parts, and those few parts work together in tight harmony to deliver an experience that fits the fluid lifestyles of the user culture we are targeting. We really didn’t try to add too many details and instead took away a lot of the pointlessness that you typically find in competing products. I believe the design succeeds and we have the sales number to prove it. I also believe this is why we won a Red Dot. Going back to our philosophy, I hope that the user will find the Voom very Useful and Beautiful and ultimately find his/her relationship with it a Meaningful one.
TEAM VAVA
What are you working on now?
WAI-LOONG LIM
It really feels like we are living a golden age of hardware development; we are working on a lot of exciting projects! For VAVA we will launch a new model of Voom very soon, even as we are collaborating on a third one.
TEAM VAVA
Do you have any final thoughts or advice for budding designers?
WAI-LOONG LIM
Well it sounds very cliché’d but design is hard work! I get jealous when other designers say they can do it in their sleep. Really? After 20-plus years in the business, I still lose sleep over design!! As a designer you need to be aware of everything around you because I believe curiosity breeds creativity. You cannot be looking at one thing only. You need to look at what I call the ABCDE: Art, Business, Culture, Design, and Environment. Another thing: hardware is hard in an increasingly tough marketplace. Your design has to compete for eyeballs as people are now accustomed to looking at products online. The opportunity for people to touch and feel your product is very slim so your design needs to tell the story virtually. Everyone is still trying to figure it out. You, the Young Budding Designer, might just be the one to do so!!
The VAVA Voom was chosen as a winner for the 2016 Red Dot Award in Product Design by 41 jury members, who assessed a record number of 5,214 products from 57 nations. Learn more about the award-winning VAVA Voom Bluetooth Speaker at: http://www.vava.com/voom_bluetooth_portable_speaker.html.
