Heather Miller
Up until last year, Arthur Jessop worked in the corporate world for a private equity-backed company. Helping to support mergers and acquisitions, including six beauty brands and a couple of manufacturing companies, the role kept him on the road while also working remotely at home. In the finance world, he was always on Zoom calls, doing presentations, and working in large, complicated spreadsheets.
“To be frank, I needed my real estate,” Jessop says. “When you’re traveling, you just have your laptop, and it was much more difficult to work and be productive without my large screens.”
Like many hardware design entrepreneurs, he saw the challenge and then set out to solve his own problem. “Why can’t I just have my exact office setup wherever I go?” This question started his own journey to prototyping, funding, and soon manufacturing Base Case, a fully integrated, ultraportable workstation disguised as a sleek carry-on suitcase.
Hand-crafting the first Base Case
Jessop embarked on his own prototype to bring his idea to life. The initial roadblock was immediately apparent. Standard carry-on suitcases open in a clamshell, but he needed a vertical opening to support built-in screens. He started by purchasing and promptly gutting a Monos suitcase, an expensive sacrifice for the sake of innovation.
“In the evenings and on weekends, I was doing all of this in my garage and my kitchen counter, trying to keep my kids from taking my tools,” he recalls.
His first prototype featured two integrated screens, a docking station, and a basic stand. It was far from perfect, but it was functional. Armed with this own invention, he began taking it on business trips as an easy-to-use, carry-on for flights. The reactions were immediate.
“I had people asking if they could buy one of these, but I was just making them in my garage and they’re a ton of work,” Jessop says. “I started thinking that this is a product that we could sell easily. It’s not for everyone, but the people that see this know it’s what they need.”
From DIY to professional product design with Autodesk Fusion
With interest mounting, Jessop faced a critical juncture of how to move from a one-person DIY project to a scalable product ready for market. He needed professional engineering support, so he enlisted the help of Martin Johnson and Jeremy Willden, founders of Constellation Labs, now part of Incredivation, both based near Salt Lake City, Utah.
Johnson and Willden immediately recognized that this project would be a perfect fit for Josh Workman, a product engineer at Constellation Labs/Incredivation. “The way everyone is coming together is remarkable,” Johnson says. “All the right people and processes have been falling into place so naturally.”
Workman took on the challenge of refining the rough sketches and prototype and turned them into precise, functional designs using Autodesk Fusion. Fusion allowed for rapid prototyping, precise modeling, and seamless integration of mechanical and electrical components. With Fusion, Workman was able to tackle many critical engineering features, including the retractable legs that spin and fold neatly into the suitcase, the dual screens, and a streamlined docking station.
Workman went on to describe the process, “It’s such a tight assembly, and everything has to be assembled correctly. It was challenging to navigate that and figure out how everything not only fits but then goes together. Fusion makes it easy to move around components and see how you can lay things out. I can also generate wires with splines and see how much clearance we have between connectors and different parts of the full assembly, the PCBs, and the fans.”
When they started building the new prototype, they came across a few hiccups where it would be extremely difficult to assemble it without customized jigs. “By using the Fusion Manufacturing Extension, I could whip up some CNC files to manufacture the jigs, rather than getting those contracted out and waiting a couple days or a week,” Workman says. “I was able to do it in two hours on my own machine just by generating the tool paths and moving right ahead. Creating the tool paths directly in the same file as everything else made it super quick.”
“Fusion is by far the most modern engineering tool. It’s constantly getting updates, and those updates save so much time. The fastener generator, for example, is huge. It saves us hours—literal hours—and prevents so many headaches with collisions and interference that we can completely avoid now.”
—Josh Workman, Product Engineer, Constellation Labs/Incredivation
Making a splash at CES 2025 and launching crowdfunding
After just six months of intense development, Base Case was ready for its debut at CES 2025. Renders created in Fusion helped showcase the product right in their booth. Major media outlets took notice with publications like Tom’s Guide and Ars Technica featuring Base Case in their coverage.
The reaction on the show floor was also palpable. Representatives from a large Federal Agency and the Department of Defense stopped by the booth and expressed their interest in Base Case’s potential for security teams, field operations, and high-level government applications. Videographers, content creators, live media production, sales teams, and anyone working remotely have also taken notice.
“We had a large hedge fund come to see us and their words were, ‘If you had these right now, we would buy a lot right now,’” Jessop says.
Currently, Base Case has an Indiegogo campaign underway and is looking to deliver products by the end of the year. The final workstation includes two high-performance 24” UHD/4K or FHD screens, patent-pending telescoping legs with multiple height options from 5.5″ to 10/12″, and it deploys within 30 seconds. According to Jessop, many are marveling that the fully developed prototype and final product were done so quickly.
“People at CES asked us how long we’d been working on this and thinking we’d been around a couple of years,” Jessop says. “We told them it’s only been six months, and they couldn’t believe it. Working with Fusion has been the game changer for us to hit our marks and goals. Now, we’re off to the races. We’re using Fusion to get over the finish line, and we’ll continue to use it to innovate on our product and our future products.”