Black rubbery OXO Good Grips dominated the category for kitchen utensils in 2000. Zyliss, a historic Swiss brand, wanted to extend it’s brand from it’s notably successful and iconic garlic presses and hard cheese graters. They wanted to become the head-to-head competitor to OXO, launching in the big box stores (Bed Bath & Beyond) with something different: something white, hard and easy to clean.
IDEO developed a full line of new kitchen gadgets and took them from research, to concept, to engineering for DFM, and through tool bring up, NPI and re-launching of their brand.
I led all the detailed design engineering on the first 36 products to go to market. We had complex 3D CAD and tooling strategies that employed multi-shot and insert molding into every product. Competitive price points meant each device needed to cost about $2 to make.
20 years later, these are stilll some of my favorite products because we made tons of them - and they are still in people’s drawers today. I’ve been doing my own real-lifecycle testing and love to think about how much value they continue to provide users.
The pizza wheel cutter was an iconic first design like this with much better ergonomics than conventional pizza wheels.
The ice cream scoop is really hefty and pleasing.
The peelers are very ergonomic and effective.
The lemon zester is lovey to hold and we used clever hermarafidic components on the inside to make the overmolding of the last shot work.
These whisks all employed a uniquely easy to clean design, with each tang it’s own not-entwined loop.
The measuring spoons and cups had nice tidy details to keep those sets together and dishwasher cleanable. The turners used high temp nylon and 3 shot overmolding.
This was a clever design for larger sized and softer cheeses, with exchangeable grinder part that also folded onto itself for drawer storage. It was fun to work on the insert molding strategies using different materials and associated tooling design.
We did the ID in Palo Alto and the detailed design engineering in the Shanghai studio and carried through NPI in southern China and launch.