Strategic Research
Industrial Design
Design Engineering
Shark Beauty briefed our design team to solve a key functional issue with their new hair brush accessory. The current design produced an unpleasant user experience (choppy-ness) when one brushed through their hair. In order to solve the products pain points, our design proposal was threefold:
After testing the current design and a round of market research our team discovered that the current ‘one size fits all’ brush solution was not suitable for different hair types. Our recommendation was to explore one type of brush in order to fulfil part of the users hair care routine. We re-directed the brush concept into an untapped marketplace by functioning as a ‘secondary wet styling brush’.
The shape and size of the brush head and bristles were tailored to make the design more suitable for brushing straight and wavy hair when wet. After presenting this approach to the client, they chose concept 3B ((rounded barrel with single direction air flow) to develop further.
In phase 2 our focus was to optimise the air flow of concept 3B using the coanda effect principle. We used CAD, 3D printed prototypes and CFD analysis to refine the air pressure and airflow direction. We went through a series of iterations before delivering the final geometry.
We took a hack-based approach (using a hybrid of regular hair brush bristles and our new 3D printed parts) with our prototypes to develop a proof of principle concept. We were able to deliver CAD model improvements on a daily basis and receive feedback on designs overnight (Our client was based in Boston, USA). We used high temperature 3D printed materials such as ULTEM and PEEK to ensure the parts wouldn’t melt when testing with hair dryer rig set-ups. This type of product development took just under a week to produce 6 testable working prototypes for the client.
This project describes how we apply human centered design principles to enhance a products performance. Through researching different hair types and finding gaps in the marketplace we were able to enhance the products functionality and drastically improve the user experience (removing the choppy-ness). We are proud to say the client saw a huge benefit in the new design and they went on to manufacture the product with our recommendations.
