BELL: CHILD BIKE CARRIER
CHILD BICYCLE CARRIER
Design Brief: Product re-fresh and the injection mold was getting near its end of life. Walmart was adding pressure because the current product was packaged in a super sized retail box. A great seller but Walmart wanted more space for other items. The item was at risk of being replaced with another item by a competitor.
What did I contribute outside of the scope? The brief was defined as a re-fresh but I recognized early on that the main issue was the product packaging size. We had a smaller carrier but it did not sell as well. My early design approach was to go outside the bicycle market and look at other industries that had similar problems. The two part design of the child carrier came from my research of pet carriers.
Role: Lead designer, inventor
Tools Used: Hand Sketching, Adobe CS, Solidworks and CNC Prototype
Results: Retained item at Wal-Mart. Reduced the retail box by 25% lowered the part cost due to faster cycle times on two tools instead of large single shot tool.
Utility Patent issued on this concept.
Patent Issued 8,251,388