We were approached by a local, successful, moulding company, Amtek Plastics, to see if we could help re-design a product for their client. Their client was Gary Burns, an entrepreneur based in Scotland. He was struggling to get an excellent idea off the ground and had had a couple of false starts and setbacks in dealings with other design and moulding companies.

Hi idea for a car booster seat that doubled as a child’s, wheel-along, luggage case, had attracted a lot of interest and he had already secured awards and investment.

The problem was that the design that Gary had was far too complicated with over 100 parts and a lot of assembly work.  Estimated cost of the product at the time was around £90 – Obviously far too expensive to be attractive to consumers.

The existing designers were also naive when it came to designing plastic parts. The design for many of the plastic components was not suitable for the moulding process without a great deal pf re-design.

At this stage Gary’s progject was going nowhere and he was stuck with plastic parts that could not be made and manufacturing costs that were through the roof.

This was when Stuart and Mark at Amtek plastics got involved and identified all the problems and came up with a plan to solve the issues and get the project back on track.

The plan involved Alphatech re-designing the product from the ground up to reduce the amount of parts and make the plastic parts mouldable. This had to be done while keeping the existing functionality and features.

Happily we were able to achieve all the goals that were set. We have reduced the part count from over 100 to 14 moulded parts and the manufacturing costs down to the target range set. The product still retains an almost identical functionality as the original.

Gary is now well on his way to securing funding for the tooling costs and initial stock. Hopefull we will see the product in the shops sometime soon.