Commercial Electric
A family of evaporative cooling fans / swamp fans developed for Home Depot's private brand portfolio, available in 2028.
Timeline:
Project background
For this project, I worked directly with the merchant team to develop a cohesive private brand product line to replace national brand products on Home Depot's shelves.
We had a few goals going into this project:
• Create a private brand advantage in a category with little brand
loyalty or brand recognition
• Design a "family" look that stretches across the entire product line
• Find a way to differentiate evap coolers from portable AC units, reducing
returns and confusion using design language
• Balance differing customer expectations (Pro vs. Homeowner)
Benchmarking & Research
Conducting market research on trends, user behaviors, & benchmarking yielded the following finding
1. The evap cooler market was heavily skewed in one of two directions: pure utility, or home-friendly & overly modern.
2. Small, medium, and large evap coolers are used in many different locations; our design needs to be flexible.
3. Pro evap coolers are so utility focused that their aesthetics suffer immensely- how can we bridge this gap?
There was clearly an opportunity available in the evaporative cooling fan market.
Trend Identification / Moodboards
Now that we had identified opportunities for the brand, we needed to determine what we wanted our evap coolers to look like in the wide canyon between "Home-friendly" and "Purely commercial".
To better articulate these aesthetics and give the team something to bounce ideas off of, I defined a few moodboards based off home comfort market trends (appliances as art, modern rugged) that we could use as reference.
Characterized by the juxtaposition of natural materials with more modern materials , pattern motifs, & soft primitive forms with sharp edges
Primarily white products with hard edges grounded with light grey accents, with occasional pops of color; a softer take on sleek black & white appliances
Focus on matte textures & a mixed use of angles, bevels, and soft curves; a future forward "techy" look. Predominantly dark neutral colors
A modern take on a utilitarian design lens, with unibody textures, liberal use of angular cut-ins, & inset contours; dark "masculine" colors contrasted with black.
Design Concepts