Design 1st

A passionate product designer and business executive, Kevin Bailey helps guide CEO’s, start-ups and established companies through the maze of hardware product development. Spending over 35 years in the detailed designing of hardware products, Kevin is now an expert at assessing risk and opportunity when making the hundreds of decisions required to move from a vision to a physical product that customers find useful and businesses can manufacture.

Since the early 1980’s Kevin has been on the ground floor of global hardware product innovation, cutting his teeth with National Research Council, General Motors, Shell, Bell Northern Research Labs and Nortel Networks where he worked on the first global smartphone development in 1994. After founding Design 1st in 1996, Kevin has emerged as one of the leaders at stickhandling hardware product development from concept to design including mechanical engineering and go-to-market manufacturing set-up.

As CEO and president of Design 1st, clients and staff rely on Kevin’s strategic thinking to guide the full suite of development and manufacturing oriented product decisions. The company’s results with new product development speaks for itself. More than 1,000 start-ups and global enterprise corporations—such as Motorola, Acer, Stanley Tools, Ericsson and Christie Digital—have brought hardware product ideas to life under Kevin’s guidance. Kevin and his team of thirty creative experts bring up to 70 projects to market for a diversity of clients each year.

Kevin is a Mechanical Engineer graduating top of class in 1984 from the University of Waterloo and has been a registered member of the Professional Engineers of Ontario since 1985. Kevin is also a VC and Angel Investor and one of Canada’s leading experts at bringing innovative new hardware product designs to market.