Big 3 Precision, a designer and manufacturer of Injection Blow and Injection Stretch Blow molds, announces a strategic partnership with Fuseneo Inc., a well-respected structural design firm with a team of designers and engineers that offers a blend of creativity, insights and technical expertise that results in innovative products and packaging.
The strategic partnership with Fuseneo gives Big 3 Precision a competitive advantage by ensuring that the product design is not only creative and innovative but is actually manufacturable. “Especially on the packaging side of our business there are a lot of design concepts that while they look great on paper, they are basically non-manufacturable. They stay just a design and never come off the table to become a reality,” explains Todd Riley, COO for Big 3 Precision.
“With this partnership, Fuseneo can blend a creative design with manufacturability to fit the molding process. We then design and build the pilot tooling to test the design, perform the verification runs. Once the pilot tooling is complete we can build the production tooling and take it to commercialization. When the customer falls in love with an innovative, creative package it’s something that is manufacturable, saving a tremendous amount of time and costs.”
The two companies will work collaboratively with Fuseneo doing the creative work on the product while Big 3 Precision engineers the mold optimized for the product design, offering total product design, development and manufacturing solutions. “This is why it makes sense for us to partner with Fuseneo rather than Big 3 Precision getting into the product design world,” explains Riley. “It makes more business sense to let Fuseneo, with their expertise and creativity in product design, be the creative force behind the product, while Big 3 Precision brings its tooling and blow molding engineering knowledge and expertise to ensure optimum manufacturability. Collaboratively, the result gives our customers the best of both worlds – creativity and productivity.”
The Fuseneo team is a mix of industrial designers, graphic designers and engineers who have diverse backgrounds. “We don’t just have an awareness of manufacturing. Many of us have worked for manufacturing companies at some point, hanging molds, refining process,” says Brent Lindberg, president of Fuseneo. “We design for a number of processes, and in the case of Big 3, we understand blow molding. Some of us have come out of the blow molding industry so we have a great depth of knowledge in that field. That extensive knowledge combined with divergent thinking gives us a totally different perspective on how we design.”
The product design element can often be an obstacle for an OEM looking for innovation and creativity, with lost time in getting a design that will accommodate the manufacturing process and the tooling required. In-house product design at the OEM often means a restricted amount of creativity. “When the manufacturer is designing a product they are responsible for producing, some of the creativity may be lost because the manufacturer designs to what they know and are comfortable with, which can be limiting,” explains Lindberg. “Our team understands not just one process, but we work with a multitude of materials and processes and that knowledge of the various production processes brings a different level of creativity to the table. We combine that experience with insights and business intelligence to go in and push a brand into innovative territory. We can be frugal and conservative yet advancing into something cool and unique with minimal impact to the processor; something that is manufacturable.”
Advertisement
Riley adds that many times when a mold manufacturer gets the product design and there are gaps in the design or issues that make the product or package unmanufacturable in the way the designer had imaged. “A lot of customers spend a lot of time and money on designs that never become reality because the silo approach of the design / manufacturing process kills the designs as well as the budget,” says Riley. “Working with Fuseneo enables a design to become a reality. We want to ensure success for our customers no matter who they are.”
Editorial Note: This post was shared by a member of the BXP community and edited by our editorial staff. Do you have news to share with our readers or a package design project that you are especially proud of? Click here to learn how you can become a contributing member of the BXP Magazine online community.
