SPOTLIGHT: Housewares

Honeywell, 4sight inc. and HMSDesign
Develop Car Accessories for Soccer Moms

The Blink line of in-car accessories was built from the ground up by trying to make the lives of busy soccer moms easier.

HMSDesign gave the Blink brand personality with soft curvy elements and bright colors.

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The Honeywell Consumer Products Group has created a revolutionary automotive product line to capture a new type of automotive accessory customer women. The brand-new Blink line of products is a coordinated line of five moderately priced products to help the 24/7 mom organize her hectic life in the car while transporting the kids to soccer games and other activities.

Partnering with Honeywell was 4sight, a product and package innovation firm based in New York City. 4sight helped Honeywell develop the structure and fuction these unique disposable products for moms to clean up messes, spills, and clutter in the car. Honeywell credits Lindsay, Stone & Briggs in Madison, WI, for the naming of the brand, but HMSDesign in South Norwalk, CT, was responsible for developing the brand positioning, personality, and packaging graphics.

Combining function with a fun look, the compact line of Blink products includes: Smudge Cleaners window fingerprint remover, Trash Tossers litter bags, Tidy Totes clutter collector bags, Mess Lifters stain remover wet wipes, and Spill Grabbers super absorbent dry wipes. These compact products are designed and packaged to be readily accessible and to "live" in the car by fitting in various side pocket areas or exposed compartments not in the trunk or glove compartment.

Designing for the demographic

Studies show that women represent 80% of mass market shoppers, and that most women never go into the automotive department of stores. To help clarify the needs of this market, 4sight used its Cultivate Brand Harvesting™ research approach with women regarding their car cleaning needs, habits, wants, and purchase behavior. As a result, 4sight helped to redefine the demographic category of women to a narrower subset of 24/7 soccer moms. This research revealed new insights that 4sight translated into key product structural platforms and opportunities.

"We designed the products with a sense of style and feminine forms, such as arches, curves and soft lines, to communicate friendly products with personality that are easy to use," says Stuart Leslie, president of 4sight inc. By integrating the structural aspects with HMSDesigns brightly colored graphics, 4sight maintained Blink's playful image.

Blink matches the busy lifestyles of moms, but the products were not developed to perform arduous cleaning tasks. The Smudge Cleaner offers a convenient glass cleaning spray solution and dry wipes separately in one package. Spill Grabbers and Mess Lifters are designed to work together as a system for managing spills and residue: First you absorb the stain, then you wipe the area clean. Tidy Totes is designed as a see-through, expandable, lightweight, non-permanent carrier for mesh tote bags.

Honeywell wanted the packaging to be integrated with the products while incorporating stylish and functional design. Clips are built in to locate the product conveniently on or in the door side storage areas as well as on the rear pockets of the front seats. The Trash Tossers' dual function clip also extends to the front of the package, offering hooks to hang trash bags. This product is also the first rigid package wipes in any category to offer easy peel opening and resealability.

Solving need states

During development of the packages and their functionality, 4sight directed thorough ethnographic studies of soccer moms' key need states. Often, these consumers have clean houses but messy cars. Test subjects told 4sight that they did not need these products because they already had products to do the same tasks. After discovering that the idea of the product did not quite match up with what soccer moms would actually use, 4sight and Honeywell began to realize that the design brief was not quite correct.

The longest part of the process was developing the platforms and structure of the Blink products. The process was a filtering through of what was important. In focus groups, it was important to listen to what the women were really saying about what they needed in their vehicles, and where they might put such products. Honeywell and 4sight decided to rethink the strategy of the brand. Leslie sums up the proper design brief: "It's not about polishing a car, it's about surviving."

Many participants in focus groups told researchers that they already had similar products, but they were not in the car. A key learning from research was that "nothing comes back to the car." Things and cleaning products go from the car into the garage, the home, or the trash.

The final Blink products look "flexible" in use applications. The product is not about a specific location because the design doesn't tell users exactly where to put it in the car, what to clip it to, or if they needed to designate one place for it at all. The versatile clips let the person's mind tell them how to use the product.

Another advantage the new designs had was that there was no "preplanning" needed to use them. "Anything that had any complexity to it was rejected outright," says Leslie. The packaging needed to be straightforward, and it needed to convey that using it would be straightforward, even familiar. Soccer moms told the researchers that they definitely did not want to learn new ways to perform old tasks.

There were several other insights that 4sight gleaned that are notable by their absence in the final products. The packages are not refillable, they are not marketed at all to men, and they are not "gadgety." 4sight was determined to not make the packages nice enough that consumers would experience any guilt when disposing of the package. All attempts to make the packages unisex, like with a less vibrant color palette, were rejected by focus groups. 4sight also found that most attempts to construct a package with inventive functionality, in the end, were not sending the right message.

A seamless system

"Another unique and major aspect of this program and process entailed 4sight's integration of a virtual factory approach," says Jim Brown, Honeywell CPG director, new product marketing. 4sight researched and interviewed 50 manufacturers before identifying the right vendor, which ended up being Rand Corp. This company showed its flexibility and capabilities to take a risk and work with multiple sub-vendors. Rand worked with vendors selected by 4sight that produced 20 different components in several different materials without compromising the design of the five new products.

The packaging structures are made of PVC pouches, injection molded clarified and regular Polypropylene, thermoformed PVC trays with injection molded ABS clips, and paperboard. By visiting the plants of the manufacturing partners, 4sight studied their production processes to see how to develop compelling packaging that would maximize Honeywell's resources. "Managing the entire pre-production phase, we also worked with the Honeywell logistics team to understand the scope of implementing these new concepts from their standpoint," explains Leslie.