Child-Safe Smart Straw™ for WD-40
In 2014, WD-40’s new Smart Straw package was recalled from Canadian store shelves for “lack of child-safe packaging.” With its commitment to product safety and user experience, the WD-40 company engaged on a courageous multi-year campaign to develop a new version of their iconic Smart Straw cap in a new child-safe embodiment designed to enhance the user experience of amateur and professional users alike. The design staff of Pixel and Timber — then members of Help Design Co. — were selected to develop this iconic and functional new design.
The goal of this project was to create a child-safe version of WD-40’s wildly successful Smart Straw package. The challenge was to identify and incorporate innovative cognitive and anthropometrics-based solutions for child safety and marry them to the iconic look and function of the existing Smart Straw design. This project utilized our entire range of capabilities, including:
Preliminary technical exploration: Research into existing methods and IP for child safe packaging
Ethnographic Research: A contextual Inquiry study with 11 professional users of WD-40
User Insights: Insights generated from interviews and observations with professional and amateur WD-40 users
Technical Evaluation: Visits to current WD-40 vendors to evaluate manufacturing capabilities
Ideation: collaborative brainstorming
2D concept design: dozens of new concepts informed by design-for-manufacturing (DFM)
Quantitative user research: Online international survey of hundreds of non-professional WD-40 users
2D concept refinement
3D concept development (CAD): three leading child-safe packaging designs were advanced in parallel
3D prototyping: All three concepts were developed as painted SLA prototypes
IP Support
The result of this project is a child-safe version of the WD-40 Smart Straw. This new product was released in the Canadian market, for which it was designed, in Fall 2020. Here is some of the feedback our team received:
“David played a very important role in a product design team when we were his clients. He brought creativity and innovative thinking to an iconic brand and package which had several design constraints. He and his team did a very wide exploration at the start that gave us much to think about. He also used some creative tools and processes that I found really useful.”
“David worked on a very important project for us at WD-40 Company. He was a passionate, thoughtful designer that looked at the whole picture from user to design to manufacture. He was patient with our changes and mediated the process in times of stress.”
