Lay of The Land #138: Mike Maczuzak (SmartShape Design + Walking Across the U.S. & World)
Mike Maczuzak — a product designer, early-stage investor, and founder of SmartShape Design — an innovative product development and industrial design firm he started here in Cleveland back in 1989.
SmartShape's beginnings were richly steeped in this world of industrial design leveraging Mike’s own background and experience in it — however over time, Mike evolved the firm’s competencies and capabilities to cover mechanical engineering, integrated manufacturing, and strategic product development across a plethora of industries like Medical, Consumer, IoT, Pacakging, digital, and many others — SmartShape’s client list is a formidable and growing group of emerging brands covering Northeast Ohio leaders like Avery Dennison, Gojo, Diebold, Sherwin Williams, Nestle, and many others, to a handful of companies who’s stories we’ve shared on Lay of The Land like David Levine of Wireless Environment and My Home Park (Episode 132), Chris Wentz of EveryKey (Episode 75), and Chelsea Monty-Bromer of SweatID (Episode 77), to international brands like BMW — and as a result, their products are ones that many of us enoucnter on a day to day basis in the real world!
While we do delve into Mike’s entrepreneurial journey building SmartShape in our conversation, we actually spend just as much time unpacking Mike’s literal walk across the United States and later, walk across much of the rest of the World — covering Mike’s motivations for walking across the country and other continents, the logistics of how he prepared and executed these walks, how he’s balanced running business while walking, and some of the incredible stories he recalled from his adventures on the road!
This was a really fun conversation that certainly plants the seeds of inspiration to embark on your own walking adventure and build an entrepreneurial organization to support that kind of freedom!
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Connect with Mike Maczuzak on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaczuzak/
Learn more about SmartShape Design — https://smartshape.design/
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