I build physical products and the intelligent systems that run the business behind them.
Fourteen years at a global appliance OEM — from supplier quality engineering to KitchenAid Global Quality Development Leader over $400M in OEM spend — plus two companies of my own. I take hardware from sketch through patent, tooling, and e-commerce, and I build AI-operated systems that let a one-person shop run like a much bigger one.
An exploded engineering drawing of a wheel assembly: cap screw, washer, end cap, two bearings, wheel, spacer, and housing, strung along one centerline. A slider pulls the assembly apart and back together.
Where science meets ritual,
and innovation dances with art.
I have spent fourteen years at Whirlpool Corporation in supplier-facing manufacturing — SQE on fabricated-metal commodities, 200+ PPAP dispositions, $400M in OEM spend, and now KitchenAid Global Quality Development Leader. Industrial engineer by training (Kettering University, BSIE + MBA), Six Sigma Black Belt by certification. I bring that same rigor to my own consumer devices, my overseas manufacturing partners, and lately to AI systems that carry real operational weight.
Hardware, end to end
Concept, industrial-design direction, CAD review cycles with overseas manufacturers, BOM and change-record verification, packaging, and launch.
Quality as a discipline
FMEA before build, 8D on every fault, evidence-gated done — drawn from ISO 9001:2015 and the AIAG handbooks, and now applied to AI reliability too.
AI-run operations
I design systems where AI agents do the operating — CRM, SEO, monitoring, comms — under engineered guardrails, so headcount stays at one.
Brand from zero
Pillars, archetype, personas, voice and storefronts all authored from nothing — grown to 10.2K followers organically, in a category where the major ad platforms refuse the business entirely.
Channel & go-to-market
Five-tier price architecture from MSRP to master distributor, MAP enforcement, and a distributor packet that landed a partner serving 8,500+ retail customers.
Education
Kettering University — B.S. Industrial Engineering and MBA, with minors in statistics, international business and business management. Six Sigma Black Belt. Graduate thesis on concept-to-consumer speed-to-market, run on a live appliance program.
Fourteen years of making suppliers and products capable
Full detail in the resume PDF.
KitchenAid Global Quality Development Leader
SME on 16 global projects; drove APQP adherence from 8/37 projects to 91% compliance (+800%); built AI analysis tools cutting issue-research time 92%; beat the global service-incident target at 0.52%; delivered millions in Total Cost & Quality yearly.
APQPPPAPAI toolingApplied AI Systems Architect & Engineering Lead
Solo-architected a production, always-on multi-agent AI platform: 1,444 commits in ~4.5 months, 114,072 lines of first-party Python across 545 modules — the platform authoring ~87% of its own code under a human review gate. Live client tenants, SOC 2 readiness, and a tamper-evident cryptographic audit chain.
multi-agent AISOC 2Python/TSFinished Product Sourcing Development Engineer
Managed 30 OEM vendors and $400M in spend; authored the vendor-training curriculum, adopted as the OEM-development standard; trained 325+ supplier personnel; 47 programs through product-level PPAP, 34 launches; prevented $14M+ in lost sales.
$400M spendsupplier developmentSQE / Senior Development Engineer
40+ fabricated-metal and electromechanical suppliers; 66+ 8D closures with cycle time cut 120→56 days; a leak-tester project took a rubber supplier from 30,000 PPM to zero; die-casting PPM 14K→1K.
8DSPC/Cpkon-site kaizenTwo companies and a brand I operate
Run day-to-day by AI systems I designed and supervise.
Rite Innovations
Luxury botanical technology for the modern ritualist. Design and manufacture of premium accessories — the Mixturus modular 3-in-1 system (utility patent pending) and the OASIS pocket line — sold direct and wholesale across three brand storefronts. First 300-unit batch sold out by May 2025.
riteinnovations.commixturus.compatent pending
Glimwright
We find what makes your business tick. Glimwright builds AI-operated business infrastructure for small companies — websites, CRM pipelines, automated operations — productized from the systems I built to run my own. Owned by MyKyber LLC.
glimwright.comagentic AIbrand + buildOASIS — operating someone else’s invention
The engagement
Engaged by the creator of the Genius Pipe — one of the most recognizable accessories of its era — to operate and scale his next invention as a complete program: commerce, content, packaging, and channel.
program leadCommerce & merchandising
Rebuilt and now operate the WordPress/WooCommerce storefront — catalog, checkout, and wholesale gating — with colorway SKU-family merchandising and automated SEO holding a 100/100 score across the catalog.
WooCommercetechnical SEOChannel & packaging
A master-distributor packet landed the national channel partner serving 8,500+ retail customers, and the packout redesign delivered the +33% pallet density in the case studies below.
distributionpackagingGravity Ignite — a manufacturer, put online
Gravity Ignite is a custom display and parts manufacturer in Wadsworth, Ohio — large-format print, cut and fabricated parts, 3D printing, and full retail display programs. An open-book partner engagement across four fronts: I rebuilt their public platform end to end — the site, an instant estimator that prices an uploaded file, and the quoting and intake pipeline behind it — and ran three process-domain programs on the manufacturing side.
What I built
- Instant estimator. A customer drops in a PDF, AI, DXF, SVG, STEP or STL file and gets a real price and lead time back — no account, no sales call.
- Quote-to-intake pipeline. The estimate feeds a structured RFQ intake, so the shop receives a priced, specified job instead of an email thread.
- Custom theme, no page builder. A hand-built WordPress theme on Cloud Run behind Cloudflare — fast, versioned, and deployable from source.
- Mobile system. Compact blurred nav bar, full-screen menu, 44px touch targets, and zero horizontal overflow, verified on a real device profile.
- Trade portal. Reseller sign-in with drop-ship and blind-shipping programs.
Three process-domain programs
Injection molding
Family-tool program for the C-channel pusher — 2+2 cavity layout, resin trade study, and a 500k-shot tool specification.
family toolresin trade studyAluminum extrusion
6061-T6 profile with Type II anodize, carried from profile design through die T1 in under a month.
6061-T6Type II anodizeNearshore production cell
An open-book CNC production cell stood up in Mexico — equipment financed, with full per-unit P&L transparency to the partner.
nearshoringopen-book P&LCase studies
Representative projects across hardware and systems. Deeper write-ups on request.
Mixturus — modular 3-in-1 device
200+ hours of design conceptualization, 800+ engineering the 3D model, 1,000+ in testing and iteration — full product development with an overseas manufacturing partner: multi-revision CAD verification, component-level change records, bilingual engineering drawings to ASME Y14.5, and a utility patent on the mixing architecture. Its form draws from the modularity of the Nintendo Switch, the silhouette of a TIE Bomber, and the grip of a katana hilt.
CAD verificationGD&TIP strategyOne-machine AI operations consolidation
Migrated a three-machine, 29-service, 26-cron AI operations stack — gateway, agent fleet, forensic ledger, monitoring — onto a single workstation plus cloud services, cutting cloud spend ~85% while adding deterministic health probes with negative-tested alerting.
systems architectureSREcost engineeringCommerce & brand site fleet on Cloudflare
Replatformed a multi-brand storefront fleet — DNS for a 14-domain portfolio, static replication of WordPress/Elementor sites, zero-downtime nameserver migrations verified by byte-parity checks and live mail canaries protecting Google Workspace delivery.
CloudflareWooCommercebrand systemsAI-governed quality system
Authored an operations canon from public standards (ISO 9001, PDCA, AIAG 8D, SIPOC) governing both human and AI work — least-privilege charters for autonomous jobs, incident-to-rule pipelines, and tamper-evident record keeping.
QMSAI governance8DOver-molded seal failure — 8D
An over-molded grommet sealing a dishwasher pump inlet was leaking in the field. Root cause was the bonding architecture itself, not the process: I redesigned the part from a chemical to a mechanical bond, eliminating the failure-mode class rather than the symptom, and added leak inspection at the supplier to close the escape path.
Two weeks to zero. $250,000/year of sorting cost eliminated, and the strategic supplier relationship preserved.
root causedesign-led CAStructural rail field-failure emergency
Welded dishwasher rack rails were corroding in the field with $2.5M of suspect inventory in the network. TIG welding had depleted carbon at the weld zone — the supplier’s corrective action was chasing geometry, not corrosion. I moved 100% of volume to a rolled-rail design with riveted intermediates, eliminating the weld entirely.
Sorting stood up on two continents, 17,000 units reworked, proactive consumer outreach across five states, and the high-risk supplier exited.
containmentmaterials scienceSix Sigma on the plant floor & cost recovery
Full process characterization of the broach operation cutting the tilt-head stand-mixer pedestal — thought maps, components-of-variation capability studies, and a redesigned fixture took control of the critical inputs from 50% to 100%.
Separately, led supplier cost-recovery negotiation across a premium finished-goods portfolio: $4.08M recovered in 2018, $1.25M+ incremental through 2022.
SPC/Cpk$5.3M recoveredPackaging engineering — packout optimization
Redesigned a premium accessory’s corrugated overpack from a 144-unit single-layer master case to a 60-unit two-layer system, with the McKee BCT compression math shown on a single page. Production dielines and the supplier specification were issued from the same study.
Board per unit down 17%, stack safety factor 1.9× → 2.8×, and pallet-area waste cut from 27% to 2.5%.
FEFCO/BCTfreight densityDFM & industrialization — owning the whole chain
A 54-print, sheet-by-sheet GD&T compliance audit of the production print set (52 part numbers) with datum-scheme recommendations and a 12-item correction list made a prerequisite to the tooling PO. Nine bilingual EN/中文 RFQ packages went out under a controlled document system, and landed-cost models located the machining-vs-injection-tooling crossover that set the sourcing strategy.
ASME Y14.5RFQ packageslanded costGeometry-fingerprint revision control
Factory revisions arrived with parts silently renumbered, so filename matching was worthless. I built an automated CAD-diff pipeline that compares revisions solid-by-solid on measured volume, area, centroid, and face topology — adjudicating 79 changes across 77 components with 909 verification renders, and catching renumbering that name-matching would have missed.
CAD diffchange controlArtus — second product line
“Seal and Wander.” A steel-encased tin-alloy travel vessel with a modular insert system — precision-stamped and crush-resistant, waterproof to 30 minutes submerged on a food-grade silicone gasket, with a fluorescent-additive ABS insert for low-light visibility. 96 × 68 × 31 mm, 97 g, $29.99 MSRP. A smaller bet on a faster cycle, proving the end-to-end playbook repeats.
stampingsealingsecond lineA business that answers its own phone and quotes its own jobs
The systems that run my own companies are the product. I build the same thing for small businesses: a website that prices work while you sleep, a CRM that follows up without being reminded, operations that keep their own records — engineered with the discipline I learned keeping dishwasher parts out of the field. If your shop runs on sticky notes and a phone that never stops ringing, I can fix that.
The toolbox behind it
Product development
- CAD design review & verification (Fusion 360, STEP supplier workflows)
- DFMEA / PFMEA, tolerance analysis, DFM/DFA
- Engineering drawings (ASME Y14.5), GD&T, doc control
- Overseas manufacturing & sourcing management
- Six Sigma Black Belt · SPC & process capability (Cp/Cpk)
- Patent strategy & prosecution support
AI & business systems
- Agentic AI operations: design, guardrails, monitoring
- E-commerce: WooCommerce, GoHighLevel CRM, Cloudflare
- Google Cloud (Secret Manager, BigQuery, Vertex AI), serverless
- RAG & vector search · MCP tool servers · LLM-as-judge eval
- Brand & web: identity systems, Pages, technical SEO
- Python · TypeScript · SQL · Tableau · Git/CI-CD
Where the work lives
The companies I run, the clients I build for, and the shops that carry the products.
The work, in the world
Product photography and brand art direction for the Mixturus and Rite Innovations — the device I engineered, shown the way it is meant to be lived with.
We do not make gadgets — we create talismans for modern ritual. A fusion of engineering, art, and reverence.— Hayden Keiser, Moments of Meaning, Buds Feed, 2025
2025 CHAMPS Alternative Culture Awards — 2nd Place, twice
The Mixturus took 2nd place in both Most Innovative Product and Best New Product at the 2025 CHAMPS Alternative Culture Awards.
Nomination ↗B2B Wholesaler ↗2025 HYPE Pitch Competition — Finalist
One of seven finalists in the Southwest Michigan Regional Chamber HYPE (Highlighting Young Professional Excellence) competition — a Shark Tank-style event for entrepreneurs 21–40 — for Rite Innovations and the Mixturus.
SW Michigan Chamber ↗Press coverage ↗Press & Features
Profiled by B2B Wholesaler Magazine and Buds Feed on building luxury botanical technology from a decade of manufacturing-quality discipline.
press feature2025The best things come from mixing contrasts
My days move between systems, cultures, and creative zones — enforcing process discipline on a global supply program one hour, sketching a brand from nothing the next. What ties it together is a love for systems that work beautifully: bringing order to complexity, and turning routine into ritual. I measure twice, I write down why, and I do not call it done until I have watched it work.
Let us talk
Whether it is a role, a product, or a system you want built — the fastest way to reach me is this form, or email me directly at hayden.keiser@gmail.com.