Case Study: Building a Better Bottle with Replenish, by Jason Foster

Little did I know how difficult it actually is to create a bottle that has two holes in it. A bottle has never been built this way. Replenish is really the first significant redesign of a spray bottle since Roger Drackett created the first Windex bottle in 1943. Creating Replenish came with two major challenges: perfecting the valve system and finding a manufacturing approach to accommodate the integrated design.

Perfecting the valve system presented a unique challenge. There were three physical properties we had to account for. First, the concentrated pods had to be easily squeezable. Secondly, the pods had to allow for proper vent-back; the valve had to allow air to flow back into the pod after concentrated was squeezed out such that the pods could retain their shape. Thirdly, the valve had to prevent the mixed solution in the top chamber of the bottle from leaking back into the concentrate pod. Our approach to addressing these three main challenges was simply trial and error. We built iteration after iteration of the concentrate pod and valve system until we found the perfect balance to meet these three properties.

Read more: http://www.core77.com/blog/case_study/case_study_building_a_better_bottle_with_replenish_by_jason_foster_19519.asp


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