Nothing changed but the skin.
Pentágono
- Industrial Design Lead
- End-cap
- Coca-Cola
The product was dead.
- What an end cap has to do
Pentágono began as an Imbera vertical refrigerator that was not selling because it was ugly. Not slowly: it literally did not sell.
The function was fine; the problem was the visible joints and assemblies. The intervention was a thermoformed ABS cladding over the cabinet already in production, hiding those joints. The original cooler tooling was retained. Pentágono inherited the design cues of The Facelift as that language extended across the Imbera line. Then it sold like hot cakes.
Same machine, new face, dead SKU to bestseller. If appearance can be separated from function, it becomes something you can change cheaply and often.
What an end cap has to do.
An end cap is the head of an aisle, the most valuable fixture position in a shop, and people arrive from three directions. The faceted body is the answer, and where the name comes from. Angled corners mean there is no bad side. You are designing for a moving eye rather than a fixed one.
The shelf on top.
- Where it went
The chamfer is also a flat surface for products that do not need refrigeration. Putting room-temperature product on top turns a single-purpose box into a category display at the cost of a pressed panel.
In practice shops put crisps there, or whatever they wanted, because the shelf was specified as a surface rather than a category. The shop decided what it was worth.
Where it went.
It became one of the best-selling models, with wide presence in Oxxo stores, especially in northern Mexico. A SKU with no commercial traction became a widely distributed product.
Twenty years of work, and the piece with the largest audience is a cooler at the end of an aisle. Two alternate finishes were developed alongside the original: one body, finish as the variable. On a product whose redesign is the finish, that is the product roadmap.
- 01Before rebuilding a product, ask whether the failing part is only the layer people see.
- 02Design retail fixtures for the moving eye and every direction of approach.
- 03A low-cost surface can expand what a single-purpose product is able to sell.
Imbera Cooling, FEMSA
