Industrial Designer

Ashland, Oregon | Onsite 4 days a week, one remote | Full-time | Travel less than 10%

Great toy design has to do more than look good. It has to create a reason to play, communicate an idea instantly, survive real-world use, and make sense to manufacture at scale.

As an Industrial Designer at Blue Marble, you'll turn ideas into products that feel imaginative, intuitive, and worth picking up. You'll move between sketching, visualization, CAD, physical prototypes, factory samples, and cross-functional feedback while protecting the core play experience from concept through production.

This is an intermediate individual-contributor role for a designer who can create with freedom and still work within real constraints - cost, materials, safety, manufacturability, timing, and the details that separate an interesting concept from a successful product.

Can you take a playful idea, make it tangible, and keep improving it until the product works as well in the real world as it did in your head?

If that sounds like your kind of design problem, we'd like to see your work.

What You'll Do

• Turn Ideas Into Play. Develop original toy, play, and consumer-product concepts that balance creativity, usability, play value, consumer appeal, cost, and manufacturability.
• Make the Idea Visible. Use sketches, renderings, 3D CAD, prototypes, and mock-ups to explore possibilities, communicate design intent, and move decisions forward.
• Prototype and Learn. Build and evaluate physical and digital prototypes, use research and product-testing feedback, and iterate when the product can be clearer, stronger, more engaging, or easier to make.
• Design for the Real World. Work with Engineering, Product Development, Compliance, and manufacturing partners to resolve materials, mechanisms, assembly, safety, quality, and production challenges without losing the design intent.
• Carry the Design Through Production. Review factory samples, refine CMF and product specifications, maintain accurate design documentation, and follow details through commercialization rather than handing off the concept and walking away.
• Create Across Functions. Partner with Marketing, Sales, Product Development, Engineering, and overseas teams; present ideas clearly, absorb useful feedback, and help the team reach a stronger product decision.
• Keep Looking Forward. Track relevant play, product, material, manufacturing, and consumer trends and use what you learn to inspire better concepts rather than simply following what already exists.

What You Bring

• A Real Design Point of View. You generate ideas, make choices, and can explain why a product should look, feel, and play the way it does.
• Creative Range With Technical Discipline. You can move from loose ideation to production-ready detail and understand when a beautiful idea needs to change to become a viable product.
• A Prototype-and-Learn Mindset. You would rather test, build, observe, and improve than defend the first version of an idea.
• Pride in the Details. You notice the small things - proportion, interaction, fit, finish, color, usability, and documentation - because those details shape the final experience.
• Collaborative Confidence. You can present work clearly, receive direct feedback without losing momentum, and challenge an idea respectfully when the product will be better for it.

What It Takes

• A portfolio that demonstrates strong design fundamentals, creative range, and your personal contribution to products developed from concept toward production.
• Hands-on experience designing toys, play experiences, children's products, games, or comparable consumer products.
• Strong sketching, visualization, ideation, physical prototyping, and model-making capability.
• Experience creating production-ready 3D CAD in SolidWorks or a comparable professional CAD platform.
• Working knowledge of materials, manufacturing processes, and the tradeoffs involved in taking a physical product from design intent to production.
• Clear visual, verbal, and written communication across design and non-design partners.

What Sets You Apart

Experience with toy or children's-product development, licensed products, overseas manufacturing partners, product safety considerations, or rapid prototyping can help you ramp faster. Fluency with KeyShot, Adobe Creative Suite, Rhino, Alias, ZBrush, Creo, 3D printing, or similar visualization and modeling tools is valuable when it strengthens the work - but the portfolio and design judgment matter more than checking every software box.

How We'll Measure Success

Your concepts become products people can understand, want to engage with, and can realistically manufacture. Your prototypes and factory samples improve through iteration. Your files and specifications are accurate enough for others to act on. You communicate early when something is not working, respond productively to feedback, and help cross-functional partners solve problems without losing sight of the consumer experience.

Is Blue Marble Right for You?

We're intentionally building a culture of people who lead by example, challenge one another respectfully, take ownership of their work, and want to continue learning and improving.

Blue Marble may be exactly the place you're looking for if...

You take ownership of your words, actions, and work product.

You value honest, hard conversations and long-term progress over short-term comfort.

You enjoy solving meaningful problems and seek purposeful work.

You see feedback as an opportunity to improve and grow.

You naturally look for ways to make things better and help others succeed.

You ask questions when something isn't clear.

You believe character matters as much as competence.

You proactively bring solutions to problems.

On the other hand, you probably won't enjoy working here if...

You spend more time making excuses or pointing fingers than solving problems.

You consistently avoid difficult conversations.

You believe your responsibility ends with your job description.

You need someone to constantly tell you what to do.

You become defensive when receiving constructive feedback.

You believe being right is more important than finding the best solution.

You consistently wait for instructions rather than taking appropriate initiative.

You have difficulty acknowledging mistakes and learning from them.

You're primarily looking for a paycheck rather than an opportunity to meaningfully contribute.

We're not looking for perfect people.

We're looking for capable people who want to keep getting better and who bring their best to the people and work around them.

If this sounds like you, let's make great things together.

This description is not exhaustive; responsibilities may evolve as Blue Marble grows.

Blue Marble is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to any characteristic protected by applicable law and provide reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process.