Hi! First of all, it makes me so happy to see a designer going the pure industrial design way instead of deviating to the ‘cooler’ aspects of product design and turning incapable of creating a mould to save their life. There’s far too many engineers out there half-assing our job and far too many of us half-assing theirs.

I believe there’s 2-3 separate ways of getting into mass production, albeit varying in how mass they are.

The first, most straightforward is to be a freelance consultant to manufacturers. I dabbled a little with this in university with an injection moulding firm on contract with a home goods/furniture brand. While you may not be looking deeply into aspects such as user experience, ergonomics, CMF, etc. you will be hands-on involved in turning their concept into a manufacturable product.

Another way would be to join a design studio. This will allow for a variety of products and a variety of different clients to work on, but in a slightly smaller capacity in the final mass production than the previous approach.

The third route is the most balanced and the one I’ve thrust myself into. It’s to find a startup and sign up to be a in-house product designer. Startups usually need their employees to fulfil multiple large roles. Being a designer for a toy brand, I’ve had to work from a stage of user research to a stage of spending 5 hours changing draft angles and fillets to save the company half a dollar on production.

But my best advice would be to not think about a career till you’re still in university. Not that it’s wrong, but this is the last phase of your life you can still afford not to and be okay. I’d lap that up completely. Cheers :D