Rachel Robinette

About Rachel Robinette

Rachel Robinette is a design leader and innovation strategist with over 20 years experience translating insights into growth opportunities and new products and experiences in a diverse range of industries. At KiwiCo, Rachel has built out and led the Product Design team, bringing strategic focus to the product roadmap, developing and rolling out a visual design language to unify the portfolio, creating product design principles, and developing multiple award-winning product lines that bring meaningful, fun and enriching experiences to kids. Heading up the design research and strategy practice at Casper, her team focused on uncovering insights about what good sleep means to people, and translating those insights into products that help us all sleep better. This work demands a broad toolkit of research methods- discovery to validation, qualitative and quantitative-as well as an ability to make people comfortable being interviewed from their own bed. In her time at Casper she has led the research that defined a number of award-winning new products including the Wave and the Glow.In her previous role at The Clorox Company, Rachel was the front-end design lead helping discover, frame, and explore new business and category opportunities. From “where-to-play” mapping to iterative prototyping and testing break-through solutions, Rachel has helped teams turn scrappy consumer research into new product platforms: creating tangible prototypes that consumers don’t want to give back, and building initial ideas into $25M-50M concepts and platforms.While at Jump Associates, an innovation consultancy, Rachel led project teams and managed the growth of the company from 6 to over 40 employees. Her design work has taken her on ethnographic research trips as diverse as shadowing cowboys in Wyoming, attending Harley Davidson rallies in Tennessee, and spending countless hours in the homes, kitchens, and cars of families across the US. As a design educator Rachel has taught design methods and tools, with a focus on design research, empathy, context, framing, and storytelling. She has had experience teaching industrial designers and engineers, as well as training and developing workshops for professionals.She holds a B.S. in Product Design and an M.A. in Education from Stanford University, where she has taught and lectured.

Experience

1. Head of Product Design

   KiwiCo, Inc.

   Jun 2023 — Present

Education

• Stanford University

  Master of Arts (M.A.), Social Sciences in Education, School of Education

  1996 — 2001

• Stanford University

  Bachelor of Science (BS), Product Design, School of Engineering

  1996 — 2001

Skills

• Consumer Products
• Cross-Functional Team Leadership
• User Experience
• Human-Centered Design
• Competitive Analysis
• User-Centered Design
• Design Research
• Team Facilitation
• Customer Insight
• Design Thinking
• Experience Design
• Concept Generation
• Front-End Design
• Team Leadership
• Sketching
• Rapid Prototyping
• Workshop Facilitation
• Product Innovation
• Product Design
• Design Strategy
• Graphic Recording
• Open Innovation
• Innovation Consulting
• Concept Development
• Strategic Planning
• Product Development
• Innovation