Favorite product/industrial designers/firms?

Anyone have any favorite agencies/designers-for-hire and links to examples of their work? I'm in early/initial phase of looking for a handful of creative and talented agencies for evaluation to work with on an upcoming consumer design project. There are hundreds of companies out there and I'm trying to narrow the field. Luckily most feature decent examples of their work online and are also responsible for their own sites - this let me rule out a number of disappointing examples already.

I'm not interested in whether you know someone at the company personally, I'm just looking for the people behind the designs you guys find most inspiring/creative/energetic/fresh/modern/timeless. So long as they're agencies and not in-house staff of a product company (like Apple for instance) Hehe.

Bruno

The first one to come to my mind is Frog Design

This guy is a friend of mine...

http://www.stollerstudio.com/SculptureFunction/IndustrialDesign.html

I really like the pioneer things.

A few years back I did some consulting work for the SF branch of these guys and they seemed to do some pretty nice work. I haven't followed there stuff in recent years though.

-Mike

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Yeah, Fitch and Frog are pretty well known and respected. Checked out their sites a few days ago. Today I also re-found a site I stumbled upon last Friday, http://www.designdirectory.com which seems like a very good resource for both clients (like me) as well as designers.

Found two designers which have worked on Rio products, including the Carbon. They're on my initial short-list right now. I don't know how closely other customers normally work with their design team, but I've already got some very specific ideas of what I want, so in addition to being talented, they have to be able to work well with my requirements/ideas and above all, get along with me (yeah, I hear sometimes that can be hard )

I'm also in the process of interviewing contract-manufacturing partners so I have to be sure that everthing/everyone fits together nicely.

Bruno