How Leadoff studio learned to sell the feeling before the product existed

Selling a feeling before the product ever existed

Leadoff Studio is a five-person industrial design team based in Long Island City, working across enterprise clients like Google, Nike, and Walmart, as well as first-time entrepreneurs bringing a product to market for the first time. Founder Jordan Diatlo built the studio around a simple premise: clients bring deep expertise in their category, and Leadoff brings the discipline to turn that expertise into a manufacturable product, a brand, and a launch.

The Problem

Days spent building a CAD model just for a JPEG

Jordan Diatlo calls himself an emotional designer. The moment he's chasing with every client isn't the one where the numbers pencil out, it's the one where an idea clicks so hard someone feels it in their gut. That moment is easy to get to on paper. It's much harder to get to fast, especially on the products that don't have an obvious path to a finished-looking image.

For hard goods, Leadoff's pipeline was linear: sketch, build the SolidWorks file, render. Soft goods broke that pipeline. There was no CAD step to inherit, so visualizing a bag or a piece of wearable gear meant building a 3D model with no purpose beyond producing a single image. The model never touched production.

"We've taken days out of our process, days that we used to spend just making a CAD model that was only for a JPEG in the end, not for production. The value of that CAD model wasn't high enough to really warrant that time."

Jordan Diatlo, Founder & CEO, Leadoff Studio

The same economics showed up on the client side. Photorealistic marketing renders were a request Leadoff heard constantly and could rarely fulfill at a price that made sense for either party, since the production time didn't clear the bar against what clients were willing to pay for it.

Solution

Skipping straight to the finished feeling

Leadoff now starts soft-good projects directly in Vizcom, feeding in early sketches and prototype photography to reach a finished-feeling image, complete with real materials, real lighting, and a real person in frame, without the intermediate CAD build.

"AI has really unlocked our imagination for what the vision of this end product will be, and we're able to take our clients along on that journey with us. We're able to get to a place of agreement and alignment with those clients so much faster now."

Jordan Diatlo, Founder & CEO, Leadoff Studio

The clearest example is Solé, a sun-protective visor developed with dermatologist and fashion figure Angelo, built to close a decades-old gap in the category: sun coverage for the face has never had a middle ground between a wide-brim hat and a pair of sunglasses. Because a face-worn product succeeds or fails on how it reads on an actual face, Leadoff moved sketches into Vizcom immediately, placing them on real models rather than a blank mannequin. The output doubled as creative direction for the eventual photo shoot, testing colorway, finish, and mood on a human subject before a single unit existed.

"Without this, we would have most likely showed sketches and maybe showed the renderings just on a blank mannequin face, something that has way less emotional appeal."

Jordan Diatlo, Founder & CEO, Leadoff Studio

Engineering decisions, like hinge friction and the curvature of the visor's swing clip, stayed entirely in SolidWorks and physical prototypes. Vizcom's role was to keep checking that the finished design still delivered the feeling the concept was built on, a distinction Jordan is precise about:

"You got to be in the driver's seat. A human always has to be involved to understand that. Without that, you're very in danger of getting a soulless product."

Jordan Diatlo, Founder & CEO, Leadoff Studio

The result is a shift in two parts of the business. Client alignment now happens in a single review instead of several rounds, because the first thing a client sees already reads as close to finished. Leadoff can also now sell a service it couldn't previously offer at scale: photorealistic marketing renders in hours rather than days, at a quality bar the studio couldn't hit fast enough to be worth taking on before. It's changed the shape of branding engagements too. Leadoff can now show a founder a five-to-ten-year vision for their brand, not just a logo and a launch palette, a conversation that's difficult to have credibly without the ability to visualize it.

Want to get your team to that emotional "yes" faster? Try Vizcom for yourself.

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