MSI Digital Tire Gauge

During our long term relationship with Measurement Specialties Inc. of New Jersey, our product design team has developed several award winning product designs for specific retail outlets. Each retailer from Sam's Club, to Pep Boys, to Radio Shack has a different customer base with varied needs and fashion sense. Once our researchers designed the psychographic profile for this Radio Shack version, we dug into the ergonomics and functional aspects of testing tire pressure on varied sizes and styles of wheels.

Imagine
The product design challenge was to develop a tire gauge that would be attractive enough to buy it as a gift. But it also had to provide excellent ergonomics which is why the product design incorporates a unique high contrast light to help locate the tire stem, and large backlit LED display to facilitate use in bright sunlight or even at night.

Implement
Our product design and development process with MSI is very interactive. We design parts and assemblies in Pro-Engineer and electronically share them from MSI's New Jersey facilities with their manufacturing facility in China. Through that interaction our award winning product designers and engineers were able to find an elastomeric paint that provides the feel of a co-molded handle for less tooling and part expense. We've also been able to cut the development timeline down to roughly 6 months including research, product design and detail part engineering.

Impact
The new award winning product design was introduced in November for the holidays and sold out 60,000 units before Christmas. It has been selling above expectations for several years. This project won both IDEA product design award and Good Design Awards for new product design.