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Private Brand Evaporative Coolers
A family of evaporative cooling fans / swamp fans developed for Home Depot's private brands portfolio, available in 2027.
Timeline: 6 weeks
Project background ​​​​​​​
For this project, I worked directly with the merchant team to develop a cohesive private brand product line to replace outdated national brand products on Home Depot's shelves. 

We had a few goals going into this project:
User Research & Benchmarking
When Private Brands first began considering replacing Hessaire products, they came to the industrial design team to get a better sense of what customers thought of evaporative coolers (also known as evap coolers or swamp coolers). 

The qualitative surveys I conducted (n = 491) revealed that customers had poor knowledge on evap coolers as a whole, with a higher than average brand sensitivity and strong biases due to inexperience with the product. We discussed several ways to educate customers, such as in-bay signage, on-packaging education, and online product information page support to help customers better understand best use case, coverage, and operation.
This work was done in tandem with market benchmarking, which helped us better define how customers were currently using their evaporative cooler products in their homes or workplaces. These research efforts aided in segmenting products, defining product tier specs, and identifying features that customers would value most.
There was clearly an opportunity available in the evaporative cooling fan market.
Conducting research on user behaviors & the market yielded the following findings:
1. The evaporative cooler market was heavily skewed in one of two directions: pure utility, or home-friendly & overly modern.
2. Small, medium, and large evaporative coolers are used in many different locations; our design needs to be flexible.
3. Pro evaporative coolers are so utility focused that their aesthetics suffer immensely- how can we bridge this gap?
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, Marissa took a look at broader home trends (warm woods, statement pieces, retro materials) & I defined a few moodboards based off home comfort market trends that we could use as reference.
Warm Home Comfort
Characterized by the juxtaposition of natural materials with more modern materials , pattern motifs, & soft primitive forms with sharp edges
Refined Practical Household
Primarily white products with hard edges grounded with light grey accents, with occasional pops of color; a softer take on  sleek black & white appliances
Dark Sleek
Focus on matte textures & a mixed use of angles, bevels, and soft curves; a future forward "techy" look. Predominantly dark neutral colors
Modern Rugged
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.
I recommended we use a mix of Warm Home Comfort & Refined Practical Household for consumer oriented sizes (small, medium, large) that would better suit interiors and fit neatly into everyday life under the Hampton Bay brand.

For professionals using XL & XXL evaporative coolers, Modern Rugged was a no-brainer pick inspired by camping goods and modern SUVs. This styling helped the merchant team clearly see how Commercial Electric could be perfectly poised to bring modernity to an outdated category.
Design Concepts
Impact— A Win for Private Brands
Design concepts were passed forward with resounding approval from the merchant team in June 2025. 

Through the efforts of the team, private brand was able to improve product on shelf, create a premium customer experience, and deliver an incremental $13M to private brands.
     •     Greater performance than national brand equivalent
     •     Introduced new features:
          →     Nesting storage & cord wraps
          →     Toolless evaporative cooler media access
          →     A rechargeable battery operated unit for greater flexibility
     •     Improved customer education on packaging
     •     Saved $1M in cost out; global & domestic supplier diversification
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