THOUGH Steve Jobs has passed away, his legend lives on in young Chinese designers like Gavin Xie, 30, who are following the Apple founder's footsteps by applying innovative design to industrial products.

Nestled in Loft Sport Creative Office, which Shanghai's fledging design firms call home, Xie's start-up A-Four Design is among the firms attracting a lot of attention.

Twelve people exercising different disciplines now work there, providing design solutions to transport, consumer electronics, machinery, tools and energy industries. The company also operates its own golf bag cart brand Palkart, and works as an original design manufacturer for Porsche.

When Xie founded A-Four in 2007, he put five services at the heart of his business strategy - product development, technical delivery, manufacturing management, marketing and strategic planning.

Gone are the days when design meant nothing more than attractiveness. Today it means everything to brand strategy, over and above the premium it generates.

Refusing to be a starving artist since his study at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Xie chose business interests over individuality in his design career.

"The only design worth executing is the one grounded in reality rather than fantasy," Xie said.

After graduation, he worked for a private transport manufacturer in Zhejiang Province for four years before starting A-Four. Plugging into the craze for FIFA World Cup 2006, he created a football-shaped portable refrigerator for a home appliance maker, which sold 300,000 units that year and became his first success.

A-Four pores over desktop and field research before conceptualizing designs, gathering information on users, product functions and industrial trends.

And very often, it boils down to a message imbedded in the product. For machinery and tools, it is first and foremost a sense of reliability.

"The common solution is to make them look compact, which means each curved surface at the joints needs to be created wisely," Xie said, pointing at ground-grinding machines designed for a construction-equipment maker.

A chic look and smooth functionality remain the golden rules for consumer products, while manufacturers are revamping blueprints in a quest for originality to satisfy increasingly picky customers.

That trend is spreading across sectors as the steady appreciation of yuan and keep eroding China's cost advantage in processing supplied materials for world markets.

A-Four prides itself on helping Triace, a former bicycle manufacturer for Wal-Mart, to establish its own brand in 2008. The carbon-fiber bicycle frame designed by A-Four has become Triace's signature image, helping propel the brand to a 10 percent share of the high-end market. The bike sells for more than 1,000 yuan (US$156) and has a high profit margin.

"Good design can be translated into brand premium, but it should be built into the whole brand ecosystem," Xie said.

Bicycles, brochures, websites, retail channels and packaging - all the customer touch points for Triace - are connected with the concepts of "young," "edgy" and "elite." The only way to convert all these elements from sketch to reality is through the coordinated work of designers and technicians.

There are three technicians at A-Four to back designers up on each project. It usually takes two or three months for the team to understand the client's technical framework before it sets out to develop a prototype.

Technical delivery has long been the shortcoming of the design industry. Though A-Four provides production consultancy on site, manufacturers sometimes still have trouble pushing ideas past the blueprint stage.

Xie said: "Knowing we designers are able to create an idea but not deliver it is distressing, and that is what eventually prompted A-Four to become a manufacturer."

A-Four rented a factory in Kunshan County near Shanghai in 2009 and started to make its own-design golf bag carts under the brand name Palkart. Thirty designers, technicians, workers and marketers hired by A-Four built the concept from scratch. The product is now being marketed worldwide, and has won orders in association with German car manufacturer Porsche.

Xie said China is not short of design talent, only sustainable designer brands.

Including the 5 million yuan invested in Palkart and the initial 500,000 yuan investment in A-Four, Xie's company is still 1 million yuan from breaking even. But Xie reckons that day is nigh.

Its design business unit notched up 4 million yuan in revenue last year after doubling its fees over the past three years. The starting price for work by the firm is now 30,000 yuan, varying according to the specifications of each project.

Xie said providing design solutions will remain A-Four's cornerstone, but the company's future lies in its ability to produce its own brands.

He said: "The point is that we can step up the role of design in the business world by establishing an idea-to-market presence, which, in turn, will give us an edge over our competition."

The game is becoming intense among industrial design firms in China.

Foreign names such as IDEO and Frog Design are gaining an upper hand in big projects, while local one-man enterprises are luring smaller clients with huge discounts.

Xie applauds the former for embedding the idea that serious design innovation comes at a high price. The latter group does not worry him, he said, because low prices will not lead to stellar designs.

However, a new threat is emerging from outside the community. Many manufacturers are starting to set up their own creative teams. But Xie still sees a huge market for design outsourcing.

"The question is, are we good enough?" Xie said. "Clients will be looking for innovation consultants who can map out a comprehensive development plan, rather than sketchers, of whom they have a great number back home."

The new role will set even higher standards for recruiting and maintaining talent. A-Four is already finding that difficult.

Many staffers who join as junior designers leave for bigger firms once they have gained experience. Slow salary growth may accelerate their departures, but the real problem is limited scope for promotion, Xie said.

Palkart is blazing a new path at A-Four, where experienced designers and technicians can work towards becoming chief innovation officers or chief technology officers of an in-house brand, he said.

Xie expects the number of such brands to grow, which will eventually build up a platform for independent designers to try out their ideas on A-Four's production line.

"I have long envisaged A-Four as a provider of opportunities besides design services," Xie said. "My first boss helped me mass-produce a bicycle I designed back in college, and now it is my turn to assist others."