Project
Wine Cooler
Client
Recent winners of the Gift Fairs people choice award for the best new product, Huski are on the mission to reinvent the drinking experience. The company was created with one mission in mind: Delivering the very best drinking experience possible. Founder, Simon Huesser, believed that the wine cooler had an opportunity to significantly improve the wine drinking experience, but there was an understanding that for a product to be successful in this space, they needed to create something truly remarkable.
For Huski, remarkable meant keeping your favourite wine at its optimal temperature for as long as possible. The design required hundreds of hours of development and iterations to create the most frictionless drinking experience. Every Celsius lower meant a victory. Blender Design took up the challenge to create Invisible perfection.
In March 2018 Huski approached Blender to develop their newest product: The Huski Wine Cooler. After successfully launching their Beer Cooler, the company was on the search for the next product category to enter, they were inundated with requests for a wine cooler and decided to tackle the project head-on by developing various homemade prototypes to see whether they could come up with a core mechanical concept that showed promise. It worked. Simon adds that “The prototype was functional”. Blender started with a discovery phase to develop the Wine Cooler, stripping everything right back and assessing the product market fit. The team then developed concepts and worked to develop them by continuously and openly communicating with the Huski team. Blender’s Industrial Designer Alistair Patterson remembers that “It was rapid, Simon was working on it full time, we were working on it full time, we would send through early stage concepts, get feedback that night, and work towards the next thing”. One of the most important aspects of approaching the design was to remove any preconceived assumptions, approaching the challenge with fresh eyes was key.
Blender Design collaborated with Mat Bogust from Think Packaging to construct an aesthetically pleasing and functional package which was easy to use and ensured that the brand philosophy stayed consistent.
The Huski team had a rigorous process to develop a two-page brief that was distilled into the core concepts and issues to tackle, “Blender just got the idea, very quickly there was a chemistry between us and they bought into the vision of creating the best drinking experience possible”. Key considerations like developing a functional and easy to use thread system for the lid that remains hidden plus silicone pads and cushioning were details that help propel the experience both aesthetically and functionally. Blender was always conscious of the people using the wine cooler, an example of this was hand size, the product needed to be comfortable to hold, it needed to feel balanced and practical. The product was taking shape and was 95% there, but as Simon explains “it’s that last 5% that takes a lot of time because that’s where you can make a good product great” The Blender team progressed through to the final product.
After almost a year of development, the Huski Wine Cooler was born, featuring a vacuum insulated premium 304 stainless steel body with adjustable height. With every part of the experience considered, the team are now excited to launch their product. 2019 is the year of brand awareness and growth to ensure the Huski brand and products reach their intended audience. The synergy between Blender Design and Huski resulted in something quite special, even remarkable some would say.
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