First, PDD introduced Nelson Pitlor, Accessmount LLC president and founder, to the Cuyahoga County New Product Development Loan initiative. Accessmount won funding to develop both horizontal and vertical recessed-can fixture prototypes.

The PDD team arranged a meeting with Pitlor and electrical engineering experts from Intertek Group, a commercial electrical testing, inspection and certification company. The group reviewed the requirements for recessed-can lighting fixtures and considered how those requirements would apply to Pitlor’s concept.

PDD’s senior product developers created Pro-E mechanical designs for the recessed-can fixtures. Their design had to take into account industry specifications, functionality, ergonomics, manufacturability, part cost and interchangeability of parts between the two light units. The PDD team handled metal part fabrication, soft tooling for plastic parts and reflector fabrication to create several prototype models that could be used to test and refine the manufacturing process.