Shane is a designer, maker, inventor and entrepreneur.
He specializes in the development of toolmade softgoods and firmgoods. He has also been known to dabble in traditional leather craft and technical apparel.
The son of a talented seamstress, he was destined to work in the softgoods industry. Shane studied mechanical engineering and industrial design at Carleton University in Canada. Over the years he has worn many hats; from managing bush camps in northern Ontario to working as the head of design/engineering at a super diverse manufacturing facility. In 2008 Shane got his first real job in softgoods at FYi Design Dept.
While Shane was getting his “masters in technical apparel” at FYi, he started combining hard and softgoods in new ways. By using his past knowledge of thermoforming and compression molding tooling design he started to manipulate the fabrics in new ways; molding them into 3D shapes and laminating them to molded plastic parts. The goal was to blur the lines between hard and softgoods completely and add a level of technical sophistication unseen in traditional softgoods. Shane coined the term “toolmade” as way to better describe these new processes. In time, these processes would become the foundation of CE softgoods industry (aka firmgoods).
In 2013 Shane took a hiatus from being an employee and started Hiatas Design, a fully equipped microfactory and soft-firm-goods consultancy located near Toronto in Canada. During this time Shane spent ~100 days a year traveling to California and China honing his toolmade manufacturing knowledge.
In 2016 Shane closed the microfactory and moved back to the west coast to build and manage the Facebook soft-firm-goods industrial design lab in Seattle.
Shane has be fortunate enough to work on projects for Bocci, Burton [AK], Patagonia, Aether, New Balance, Gore R&D, Disney, Apple, Arc’teryx, Cohaesive and now Facebook AR/VR. You can see a sampling of his work here.