As well as the usual processes of research and design, the team at Harmony developed a set of rules in which all the team were required to have regular customer encounters – from senior leadership down to junior engineers.

Making a new family of kitchen gadgets could not just be about an easy grip … observational research in people’s homes while they were cooking highlighted the role of family and cooking together (with children joining in especially). And, of course, the inevitable need to make clean up fast. Innovations that resulted from these insights included a salad spinner with an integral brake and a potato masher with no enclosed spaces to trap potato.

Before being engaged on innovation in 3-ring binders, qualitative surveys had found that the snap of the three rings was not a problem for users and we were directed to look for innovation elsewhere.