Quirky President Doreen Lorenzo Quietly Steps Down

On the remaining day of December, Doreen Lorenzo quietly stepped down from her position as president at Quirky, the crowdsourced product company. There used to be no press liberate, and the information didn’t seem anyplace. She worked there just 15 months, after serving as president of Frog for 16 years, which she helped scale from a boutique design firm to a globalnodeduring which she multiplied the company’s means to show concepts into products. “over the past yr and a half, you’ve considered [Quirky go] from making small plastic stuff to special complicated merchandise. She performed a major position in that.”

Lorenzo worked at Quirky throughout a transitional time, as the corporate’s business version multiplied from developing some GE merchandise alongside the tips of the Quirky group, to constructing Powered by Quirky product partnerships wherein the Quirky group and design studio turned into a sort of crowdsourced building agency for a lot of companies. Quirky recently introduced a partnership with Harman, and a line of home equipment that routinely orders refills for coffee and child formula from Amazon. Lorenzo concept having these new partnerships in situation marked a excellent leaping off level for her. “I knew I wouldn’t stay there perpetually. Ben [the CEO] knew the same thing. … It’s a startup. every startup has evolutions and changes they go through.”

Quirky will not be changing Lorenzo. She’d built a “self-organized machine” for product development, Kaufman says.

nowadays, Lorenzo still consults at Quirky, but slightly than commuting from Texas to big apple, where Quirky is headquartered, she has moved back to her fatherland of Austin to, as she places it, “pay it forward,” and spend her newly found free time working with firms that are looking for out her expertise in constructing a a hit, design-led company tradition.

though she’s no longer running a company, Lorenzo nonetheless serves on six completely different boards—including The Foundry, a huge special results software company that’s breaking into product design; response Housing, a pop-up refuge industry based by way of an ex-Frogger; and save Vida, a garb company that invests a component of its revenue into improving the training of its personal feminine factory workers in Pakistan and India. On high of all that, she’s a mentor at SKU, an Austin accelerator the place she’s also an investor.