Launched in 2010, York Fitness approached CobaltNiche to design a new range of treadmills which would have mass appeal for the growing and competitive domestic home fitness market. The styling for such a large product demanded a fine balance between excellent proportion, blended with technical sophistication that gadget friendly consumers now demand. Packaged, these design attributes fit contemporary residential environments and offers both visual and technical benefits over the competition.

PROCESS

A well constructed project plan and design methodology was required to leverage the wealth of knowledge from York's management. Good design is as much about listening to your customer as having the courage to occasionally challenge ideas.

An extensive design concept sketch stage was initiated to explore the creative thoughts for style, proportion and function. With some theme directions identified the CobaltNiche team worked in full size early to explore proportion and worked with foam models and tape drawings to test the sensitivities of the new design. High quality CAD surfaces were developed which were CNC machined and fitted to existing treadmill frames. With the desired theme and overall proportion fleshed out we brought forward a preliminary engineering stage to prepare the interface lines, internal package of electronics boards, speakers and HVAC ducting. This CAD package of internal components was used as an underlay for the surface modelling enabling styling design and product engineering to work in parallel.

A FUNCTIONAL, INNOVATIVE RESULT

Innovation was a key ingredient to this new product range. York initiated several ideas on how to improve safety and CobaltNiche integrated a market first safety feature which incorporates infra red sensors at the rear automatically shuts down the treadmill power if a small child crawling into the zone around the moving running belt. The tech savvy were also appeased with the new design with the first treadmills to include iPod docking to integrate with the inbuilt speaker system.
CobaltNiche was able to develop the range ‘Monza’ which extended to 4 treadmills through a clever part break up scheme which enabled maximum differentiation whilst sharing multiple components.