JS Humidifers
A radical design overhaul is helping JS Humidifiers attract new business and reduce costs.
Background
JS Humidifiers is a well-known and respected player in its specialist field, producing equipment that keeps humidity stable in critical environments from print works and pharmaceutical plants to textiles factories and art galleries. The business also has a fast-growing online consumer division which generates around 20 per cent of its turnover.
Problem
Competition is intense. While the business has a 25-year track record and a majority share of the UK market, many of its international rivals for overseas business are subsidiaries of much larger companies with marketing muscle to match.
So JS, with help from Designing Demand, has embarked on a product and brand overhaul to bolster competitiveness, particularly overseas, by increasing sales and cutting costs.
Response
Sussex-based JS Humidifiers realised design could sharpen its competitive edge: ‘Good design sells, without a doubt. If you can put a well-designed product in front of a customer that’s half the battle. As a manufacturer you’ve constantly got to look at the design of your products as well as manufacturing processes and material costs,’ says Technical Director Tony Fleming.
The business joined Designing Demand’s Generate service after a prompt from its Business Link advisor. Working with Design Associate James Duguid, the JS team defined objectives and targets for its design project. ‘We have our own design team but we thought we could benefit from external advice and James helped us to clarify our design brief and what we could get out of the project.’
JS chose to focus on its key JetSpray range, which is used in industries including textiles, tobacco and printing but was showing its age. ‘We’d been making it for a long time and we knew it was looking dated,’ says Fleming.
The 12 month design project was handled by the four-strong design and engineering team, joined by University of Brighton product design graduate Stanislas Brahier, a placement as part of the Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme funded by SEEDA.
As well as improving the appearance of the product, the project has dramatically improved its specifications, enhanced its capabilities and slashed manufacturing costs by 25 per cent.
‘We’ve improved the way we manufacture through factors like supply chain management, inventory and commonality of components. We’ve also used our CAD software to the full, which has improved efficiency because drawings now go straight to sub-contractors’ machinery rather than having to be re-programmed for them by the sub-contractor. And we can now use it to prototype more rapidly too.’
As well as looking more modern, the new Jetspray is more attractive to customers in other ways. It has double its predecessor’s capacity and the enhanced workload can be handled from one control panel rather than the two which would have been needed previously, so keeping costs down. Energy consumption has been halved too, boosting the JetSpray’s sustainability credentials.
Taking part in Designing Demand has also acted as a catalyst for an update of the JS brand. ‘When we joined Designing Demand we weren’t consistent in terms of what the products looked like or in how we used our brand. James helped us realise we needed to improve our corporate image.’
Again using internal resources, the business carried out a separate project to simplify and modernise its logo and lay down guidelines for how it is used across products and marketing materials.
James Duguid said: ‘The difference in product and brand is dramatic. Overall the project has shown JS Humidifiers the value of properly resourced product design and looking externally for specialist support.’
Impact
The impact of the redesign has been immediate. The JetSpray was launched at a major European trade show, where it generated 300 sales leads and orders worth £1m. ‘By investing in modernising your products you stimulate sales and that’s certainly happened here. We’ve already seen a substantial increase in sales of the JetSpray,’ says Tony Fleming.
Brand and product development have come together in guidelines for future product development that will help JS Humidifiers express its identity through what Fleming calls ‘a family of products’. A new version of the company’s HumEvap range, set for launch in the US spring 2008, is the first result.
Download JS Humidifiers case study PDF
Tony Fleming, Technical Director of JS Humidifers, talks about how they redesigned their product to boost sales. Watch the video: MPEG (4Mb) or Windows Media Player (2.5Mb)
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