Building a physical product is rarely just about design or development. It’s about execution, supply chains, and getting from idea to scale without losing momentum along the way. That’s where Doris Dev comes in.
Doris Dev is a full-stack product design and development agency that works closely with brands from concept through production and fulfillment. With deep experience in manufacturing, sourcing, and on-the-ground factory vetting, Michael and his team operate less like a traditional agency and more like long-term, embedded partners, owning the messy middle between vision and reality.
We sat down with Michael De Santis to talk about how Doris Dev came to be, what most agencies miss, and why maintaining design integrity through execution is one of the hardest (and most important) parts of building great products.
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Doris Dev is a full stack product design and development company. We support businesses of all sizes on design, engineering, and setting up supply chains for scale.
Doris Dev was born at a time when venture capital was generously flowing into early stage consumer and we identified a clear need: businesses needed on the ground support to vet factories and build durable supply chains.
The team had experience in working with China and had built a team in Hong Kong for a prior business which led us down the path of becoming a turnkey solution for quality product.
You need to listen, digest, and then roll-out processes to support your clients. Different clients have different needs but transparency is the biggest piece of the puzzle. If you stop building process, you will eventually lose momentum.
Truly, being a jack of all trades and a master of none. I've spent my career in the zero to one world and as a result, I've become dangerous in all the steps required to get these businesses off the ground.
The opportunity with Doris Dev arose out of a need for having a 'runner' to help get Canopy off the ground.
In the early innings of building product, everything is bluesky. Clients tend to fall in love with the design process because its the first time they are getting the opportunity to pull their idea out of the ether and start to understand how the look and feel will come together.
Taking product from concept all the way through fulfillment to end customer. There are plenty of folks who do pieces of what we do but very few who can take it from a product from idea all the way to production at scale.
What this means in practice, we are long term embedded partners and there is no passing of the buck. Regardless of industry, everyone has dealt with the trials and tribulations of what happens when you leave design and step into the actual execution of that design. We make sure to maintain the design integrity of our programs.
I would say it's being talked about plenty but the introduction of AI tools into the creative process is going to fundamentally shift the speed and quantity of concepting. This can be a double edged sword.
In order to design product, you need to sit with it and think through every angle. It's not just the look and feel of the product but how the user interacts with it. As good as AI may be at making things look cool, it's not clear to me that they are going to be able to support how humans use products when they hold them in their hand.
We needed to focus exclusively on products that would actually make it all the way to commercialization. Too much work gets done on products that never see the light of day.
Measure twice and cut once. Especially when the cutting you are talking about is very expensive pieces of steel used for mass producing products at scale.
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