Behind The Invention Of A Better Garage Storage Solution

You might think that making a metal pegboard system is a no-brainer, and you’d be right – if the pegboard was a lousy product. Ironsides Storage Solutions’ Holey Rail™ provides a window into how inventiveness and quality control can improve even the most innocuous items around your household. In fact, that’s the point; if a garage storage solution gets noticed, that usually means it isn’t working properly. The Holey Rail™ design team used the following process to create a better steel pegboard system.

Research and Competitor Testing: Ironsides Storage Solutions began because it saw a need in the storage system market. With space at a premium in many modern houses, homeowners increasingly resorted to improvised methods to get their property off of garage floors. The team acquired first hand experience with other systems as they were actually being used – and often, overloaded. This allowed them to find stress points and other common problems to focus the design of their own products. Aside from the Holey Rail™ itself, this also influenced the design of the company’s peg hooks and Pegstrapper™ systems. One of the most important insights that came out of this process was the superiority of an extruded steel pegboard system over simply cutting holes into a steel plate.

Prototypes and Product Testing: Once the team zeroed in on its objectives it was time to create prototypes. No product is perfect the first time it’s manufactured, so prototyping allows a manufacturer to iron out any issues with the product or manufacturing process before it gets released to the general public. Eventually, Ironsides Storage Solutions satisfied itself that it had found the best way to manufacture extruded metal peg boards, peg hooks and other products at a consistently high quality. This also helped the company develop effective customer support. Complete knowledge of the product means Ironsides Storage Solutions can properly advise consumers on how to properly install and use its products.

Quality Production: The next step is to adapt the process to a working production flow. Without an efficient manufacturing process that still preserves the product’s quality, time and materials considerations would create a spike in production costs that the company would have to pass on to the consumer. Ironsides’ team eventually got efficient production down to an art, enabling them to offer a quality product at a competitive price.

Continual Quality Management: Ever since the Holey Rail™ was released, Ironsides has kept on top of product quality. This has two aspects: response and improvement. Response tracks the rare defect or issue to its source. After examining the flawed process the team changes production to ensure that the issue never arises again. Improvement refers to the effort to gradually increase product quality beyond even the standards of current production. In the case of steel pegboards, this involves responding to customer and distributor feedback, and exploring different material dimensions, mounting methods and supplemental products. In many cases this paves the way for entirely new products, such as the modular storage system Ironsides Storage Solutions expects to release in the near future.

Each of these steps helps ensure that something as basic as a garage storage solution works better than any ad hoc alternatives and demonstrates that even products that tend to fade into the background are the result of intelligence, research and hard work.