PROJECT: SOFT OVERCAP DESIGN
Challenge: As a product designer at Gillette, I designed a thermoformed soft overcap, a flexible plastic covering for razors to protect blades from damage during transport.
A similar Gillette product with an overcap
Process: The biggest challenge surrounding this project was designing an optimal product that would satisfy five constraints:
- Cap Retention: I worked with our Products Research team to understand critical user needs - ease of removal, safety, and intuitive touch points for removal. At the same time, I balanced the needs of our downstream packaging engineering partners to ensure that the overcap would not fall off during transport and cause blade damage.
- Heat Sealing: The design was required to have enough surface area to be heat-sealed on a display card in the store.
- Minimal Transport & Warehousing Costs: The design required that the product take up a minimal footprint when stacked on a pallet for shipping.
- Feedability: This overcap would be assembled on a machine that caused components to nest into each other, and so the design had to ensure that this would not happen.
- Manufacturability: Thermoforming is an imprecise manufacturing process and this overcap was required to maintain tight tolerances to produce a repeatable and consistent experience for the end consumer.
Results: I designed a robust, repeatable, and scalable design that optimized consumer satisfaction and satisfied all constraints on time.