The Product:
A stylish, innovative sneaker gel brush to care for the growing style of Shox sneakers.
The Challenge:
With the advent and success of the Nike Shox sneakers, a major US shoe care brand saw the opportunity to capitalize on the trend with new accessories, including an all-in-one shoe brush to care for and complement this emerging product.
Bestol was tasked to work with a designated US industrial design firm to engineer a stylish, functional, affordable product and packaging that could accessorize the Shox sneakers. The challenges were in building a modular “kit” that could be innovative, effective and affordable, and also reliable under constant, semi-rugged use.
The Solution:
he idea for the shoe brush kit was borne out of the opportunity to upsell the growing customer base for Shox at the point-of-sale, or check-out counter.
The US client and their Industrial Design firm conceived a number of creative product concepts, and arrived at a range of accessories, eventually focusing on a stylish, Shox-specific all-in-one shoe gel kit. From this point, they presented the all-in-one concept to Bestol and together we collaborated for weeks around how to incorporate a bottle of cleaning gel, an applicator and brush, as well as a “detail” brush into an elegant chassis, with good form factor.
From this stage, it was handed off to Bestol to engineer a functioning prototype. To keep costs down for development, tooling, and product, Bestol engineers (based in Shenzhen) surveyed the market for analogous, available components including the brush applicator, and the styling brush. From this point, we could accommodate the design of a gel flask, hook-and-valve delivery system, and plug-in cap around the standard brushes.
With these dimensions delineated, Bestol was able to generate prototypes using stereolithography (SLA), that could be leveraged for functional testing, as well as for marketing purposes with our client and their retailers. One of the issues discovered via prototype testing was gel leakage around the cap-flask seal, which lead to a modest engineering and material project to identify the ideal geometry and material hardness to maintain a reliable seal during gel dispensing.
The Success:
After months of design iterations, collaboration and testing, we were able to achieve compelling functional and aesthetic results.
The client and their retailer were impressed, and Bestol then quickly moved to tooling and optimization for production.
In the end, the client and retailer had a well-conceived, quickly engineered product that helped grow the checkout value of this highly successful new sneaker.