Ian Coats MacColl is a passionate industrial designer / product developer creating value at the intersection of design, brand, and implementation. His clients are both domestic and international in a broad range of categories including Health and Beauty, Toy, and Fitness.
He was Chief Creative Officer at Green Toys where he led the creative process for both product development and marketing communications. Green Toys makes the highest quality toys in the industry from recycled materials manufactured in the USA.
Ian was previously the vice president of design at Perfect Fitness where he had responsibility for the look and feel of all brand touch points including product development, packaging, web, and print. Perfect Fitness is a consumer products company making high quality solutions around the functional movements of the body.
Before Perfect, Ian was vice-president of Research and Design at Wham-O, a toy company located in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he managed development of brands for Frisbee, Morey Boogey, Super Ball, and Hula Hoop. He ran his own design consultancy for 10 years with clients including Target, Mini, and Camelbak and was the managing director of IDEO San Francisco, a product development consultancy.
Ian is a full Professor of Industrial Design at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and has taught in the program since 1992. He received undergraduate degrees in Thermodynamics from Brown University in Providence Rhode Island and in Industrial Design from Art Center College in Pasadena California. His work is in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art and has received numerous professional accolades including IDSA Gold, Oprah Best Of, New Beauty Awards, and the IDSA Merit Award.
When not designing, you will find him either with his wife, three kids, and the dog or in a circle with friends, new and old, playing harmonica on a wide variety of genres.
“Ian was a tremendous asset to Green Toys. First, as a strategic consultant in our early days when he helped devise a strategy that we executed against to great success. Second, when he helped steer the company after its private equity sale. He was uniquely qualified to help us create growth when we needed to expand beyond our current categories.”
“Ian led our transformation from a company making a handful of products to an internationally recognized brand making almost a hundred items. His commitment to our growth contributed critically to our acquisition by a private equity firm.”