CobaltNiche have developed a broad range of buckets, mops, brooms and brushes for the iconic Australian homewares brand, Oates Clean.

From 1999 to 2005 when the company was taken over by new owners, GUD Holdings, CobaltNiche designed a new family style for the brand and engineered a number of firsts including:

• Premium broom, brushware and mop ranges
• Cone-wringer bucket
• Commercial roller and press-wringer systems
• Multiple buckets including general, window-cleaning
• Application of consistent branding, colours and labeling across existing and divergent products

CobaltNiche worked closely with both marketing and technical groups to provide Oates with creative product and engineering services.

During this time we also undertook a kickStart creative ideas workshop. This involved facilitating a de-Bono style ideas session with representatives from Oates, their major buyers and CobaltNiche team members. The output of the ideas session was a harvested and ranked list of hundreds of ideas, several of which are now successfully in production.

Engineered to last

CobaltNiche worked with Oates Clean’s team to engineer products that survived the real world. For example, mechanisms to survive material stress due to boiling water and over-exuberant force. Oates had extensive in-house expertise in manufacturing brushware including machinery to loom fibres used in their brushware, mops and brooms. This experience and insight provided an excellent backdrop to our, broader design and plastics knowledge; allowing us to engineer products that consumers trusted.

Its all about the customer

Consumer products like Oates Clean have a complex chain of customers; all of whom which need to be considered during design and development.

Internal sales team: need to be motivated to ‘own’ and sell their category.

Retailer: Retailers are increasingly critical within consumer product categories. Clearly a brand’s design and ability to innovate and engage with end-customers will be critical to the buyer who decides on acceptance, shelf-space and catalogue support throughout a national chain of high-volume superstores.

End customer: People like you and me who are faced with a need and must self-serve ourselves the right product through a bewildering range of alternative products and price/quality levels.