Design Ideas
From the Lab: Meet a Marvin R+D Manager
Scientist, researcher, and more, Justin Hoey checks in to share his Marvin experience and how his work on the Marvin Modern collection marries science with aesthetics.
Maybe it was destiny? Or a calling, if you’d like. But for Marvin Research + Development manager, Justin Hoey, growing up to be a scientist just seemed right.
“I've always liked materials. I've always liked how things work,” Hoey said. “I was the kid that when we went to garage sales, my mom would buy me old radios and things that I could take apart, dismantle, see how it worked, and then maybe put them back together.”
Hoey went from re-wiring a flashlight when he was 9 to a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from North Dakota State University, so it’s easy to see a throughline.
These days the R+D manager spends his days wearing all sorts of different hats-and-lab-coats as one of the primary researchers for Marvin Modern collection windows and doors in Fargo, North Dakota. That means everything from spending time in the field studying the color resiliency of window exteriors to understanding the wind load of a massive Multi-Slide door.
Through it all, Hoey relishes the chance to work behind the scenes with his fellow scientists, engineers, and researchers to help produce the most beautiful and best performing Marvin windows and doors possible. Products that don’t just look good and meet the design goals of architects, builders, and homeowners, but also stand the test of time.
“Our job is to ensure everything works the way it's supposed to,” Hoey said, “and continues to work that way.”
Here’s more “From the Lab” with Justin Hoey:
How would you describe your role in R+D at Marvin?
First off, I really love working with people. I have a technical skill set, but my job as a manager is working with people.
For me, the role is different every day. That's kind of the cool part about it. Some days I'm doing testing and analysis. Some days I'm going to be helping with our test wall, where we're going to test the products, looking at performance. My team is going to be doing that, so I might come through and help them with that, keeping track of where we are, where we’re doing really, really well and where are areas where we can come back and say, "Hey, we can make this even better than what we have right now."
I have the privilege of working with a lot of different teams, whether it's our testing teams, our materials teams, our R+D development teams, our quality teams. I really get to do a lot of things. Quite honestly, it's a blast.
Whether it’s for an architect, builder, or homeowner, how does your work at Marvin help deliver on their design goals?
The Modern product and our work is meeting their goals in two ways: One of them is in the product design itself. Our teams are very knowledgeable in how to create a product that's strong, but is still minimalistic, as far as the view that you see. The other is through the material research. We have the proprietary High-Density Fiberglass material that helps us keep things small and narrow, but very strong. This fiberglass material, that's the backbone of our Modern product. It really gives us an edge on being able to handle these large pieces of glass that meet their design ideas.
What do people find most surprising about what you do?
The biggest thing that we see, people are like, I never believed that windows were that complicated. They ask, “why would you need researchers, chemists, engineers to work on a window? They look so simple.” That's the big thing that people don't understand. “Why do you need a lab? Why do you need testing things? It's a piece of glass. Come on.”
The next surprise would be the amount of technical prowess that our team has for testing and researching windows. This is reassurance that all of this has gone into the product that they look at that seems so simple. The truth is that we don't want people to look at it and be like, “what is this conglomeration of things?” We want them to look at it and either think that it looks really beautiful or for them to be able to just enjoy the view outside.
Attention to detail is so important at Marvin. What details do you pay special attention to?
We're helping on a lot of different ends. Sometimes it's our continuous improvement testing, where we're testing products to see how they work on the test wall. Or, we're testing new materials: how do they perform? All of the details matter and we’re trying to understand and document that.
One little test could have a huge impact on decisions we make on our products and how they perform. So, those details do matter. But the biggest thing about it is all those details drive to a decision that needs to be simplified down to “we should do this and here's why we should do it.”
That's one of the biggest things that I get to do is to take this massive agglomeration of information and testing and bring it down into layman's terms of: “So, what now?”
For being more than 100 years old, Marvin is still innovating and improving. Big or small, what do you find the most intriguing or impressive about the innovation in your role?
I think innovations come in a lot of different ways. An example, at Marvin, we have our own test walls at multiple locations. We take our products and we're able to test them at very large sizes – in some cases, we're at 36-feet wide and 10-plus-feet tall. We're able to test them for structural strength, simulating the wind, we're able to test for air leakage and for water. We're able to see how well they perform.
Our development teams, as they're going through and making a new design, they're able to see that in real time and be able to take that unit, test it, take it off the wall, change something, put it back on, and retest it again. That's one of the advantages of Marvin and the innovation opportunities that our product teams have is this ability to actually go back and forth with our testing and R+D teams.
What’s an example you can share that shows the immense amount of research, testing, care, etc. that goes into Modern collection products?
One example is around the large sizes that Modern offers. When we're talking about the doors in these large sizes, there's a lot of weight and load that goes with that. They’re really, really heavy; some of the products are well over 500 pounds. So now you've got challenges with wind load, with putting a big piece of glass in its frame, with frame strength itself. All of those things involve engineering, but also research, design, and testing. But we don't just want it to be strong; we want it to look good. We want it to have all the strength, but also the modern aesthetic that our customers are looking for, too.
What is it about your work that makes you most proud?
Being able to help so many different teams and departments across Marvin. We’re able to help all these other teams thrive. When we’re able to solve a problem that we're having, and we didn't know what that solution was, but now we do? That’s awesome; that's where I'm really proud. I'm just so happy that we're getting the best product out to the customer.
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