EPISODE 21 - KEN MAIDER
Welcome to the Impulse Spotlight where we meet with product development professionals and shine a light on the products they are most proud of.
In this episode, we speak with a guest who spent his early career working at Gillette Company as a New Product Commercialization Manager where he played a key role in the development of iconic product lines such as Sensor, Mach 3, Venus, and Fusion. In his spare time he enjoys traveling with his family and spending time with his children and grandchildren.
Ken Maider is a born and bred Bostonian. He attended Tufts University, earning a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on Engineering Design. After his tenure at Gillette, Ken provided product development consulting for American Safety Razor. He then spent eight years at Keurig, where he contributed to the innovation of K-Cups, soft drinks, and a notable joint venture with Budweiser called Drinkworks.
In our discussion today Ken provides a detailed look at the 4 year long process of taking the Mach 3 razor from initial concept to finished product ready to go to market. Ken's expert knowledge of developing mass consumer products is clear as he walks through the multitude of front end development steps involved in designing a product. From running market tests for proof of concept to distributing thousands of prototype samples to manufacturing and automation engineers in order to prepare for mass production Ken has seen it all.
Join us as we gain a better understanding of the work required when production volume numbers are in the billions and learn a little bit more about the products we see on store shelves everyday.
Show Notes:
Podcast Transcript:
Hey Ken, Welcome to the show
Great thanks for having me i am excited to have the conversation
Good to have you here so i started impulse almost 26 years ago kind of saw the writing on the wall at a company i was working at and that company had all fastest of product development under 1 roof so i tell people i got my master's degree in product development working there so tell us about you and how you got into product development.
it is probably starts back i went to mechanical engineering school my father had a repair shop auto repair and was always it to fixing stuff and it seemed like a good fit so i started down that path and early in the education i had a design course that was led by 2 gentlemen that were really into product design and they had done the reach toothbrush for johnson and johnson and they took that from an idea there are heavy into human factors they did a lot of studying and came up and really transformed the toothbrush market when reach toothbrush came out and they had a lot of utility IP design IP and it really changed my way of thinking of how to do design work it was extremely interesting and i had a leaning towards the consumer product side of activity finished work that i actually had a design engineering graduate program that i stayed on for a couple of years did did work in that area and wound up working at gillette which was heavy into consumer products and at the time get to papermate so i started off in the paper mate world working on design and development of writing instruments so you are learning about metal forming point making ink chemistry plastic moulding high speed assembly all of those disciplines which then i rolled into gillette shaving world and spent time as wall up all in i had almost 25 years in that world of hard core consumer product you know industry leading type of skills development so it was it was a it was a great place to to grow and learn and and a fun place to work
Yeah Yeah it sounds awesome so tell us about the product you want to talk about today.
So when we get has had a history of dominating the the shaving world both in volume and in price and 1 product that that was a a big bump forward was the mark 3 razor so that was you know it is a little older now and they have moved on to fusion and other other different activities but that was a major you know at the time in the 19 1990s it was 750 million dollar development exercise in a 750 million dollar marketing campaign so it was just a an incredible effort and i think the the big thing that i learned in that environment that it was not a it was not an elon musk type of 1 lead person that is is leading the show as an organization that had a lot of discipline and a lot of structure that took concepts and in a very disciplined way had many concepts that attempted to advance and they were were very controlled and and spending development money and really being sure that you did not move from a concept to a design to scale up unless you had demonstrated success and because they dominated so much of that shaving world and made so much money they were very protective of that brand identity they did not want any type of new product flop so they were very disciplined and structured through the product development process and it was a it was a very good learning ground as a developing engineer
Yeah i can imagine tell us more about the product what like tell us about some of the key features i assume you can talk about this stuff now some and innovations that happened.
Yeah it is it is only so the way there their world worked is they had an advanced concepts group that was in a separate facility in a separate country and it was just a think tank working on on concepts and as 1 new product was launched before it was even launched they were working on what are the next ones and they could be 20 in the pipeline nd for 1 to advance it had to demonstrate that it was significantly improved over the existing marketplace so they would do market testing shave testing because it there was no way to ensure that you had a superior shave without shaving it with people so they had to the r d group had to say here is here is a3d bladed concept and we have identified how we make it perform and they would have a several market shave test to say yes you have you have demonstrated that is better than the market and it was a team of very smart people that developed that and then they would hand that concept to the design group and they were there were suddenly designers embedded in the concept group that would come with the transition and the design group took that concept that was 3 blades over 2 and how do you put design specifications around that that you can make millions a day make them at high speed mold them assemble them put a bladed edge on the the blades and make sure that when you have taken that concept and put a hard design around it that it still works which is another team of people so there are um you know there could be 20 + people at this stage refining the design several hard core designers early phase machine designers injection models all providing input so that when the design was complete that it still delivered the performance that the concept demonstrated but that it is prepared to be scaled up and brought into a factory with multi cavity mold so that some sometimes in prototypes you have handmade prototypes in this world a prototype was was sample molds and making thousands and thousands of prototype pots you had to be able to make enough prototypes so that automation engineers had enough pots to understand how they were going to put it through high speed assembly so that mold designers that were going to do high cavitation tooling could understand how they were going to be able to mold this at scale multi material molds that we had to put on elastomers on on hot plastics and all of the integration of that what is the design what is the specification how can we refine it and still deliver the performance and and from beginning to end it was approximately a 4 year activity and because it is you had to you know in the design phase after you have proven the concept you have to then prove the design and have all of the design specifications developed samples get turned over to the commercial side of the organization where they would do independent market testing and and and shave it against the existing products that are the the best currently on the market and proving out that level of performance and then also early commercial activities of going to walmart and target and all of the big retailers and saying here is a latest product still in its prototype you know design prototypes which are still very sophisticated and making sure that there is going to be peg space and the supply chain is prepared for it and get an idea of you know what selling would look like what is the volume expectation so when you are you are looking at the capital investment of 10 2030 high cavitation tools how are you going to make sure that you make a wise capital investment but also make sure that you have enough of the product available so when you start filling the pipeline at walmart and costco and target that you have the millions and millions of units ready to go the first week that you want to start shipping the product
Sure sure going back to the kind of the advanced concepts teams in the in the prototypes i was going to ask about how do you how you get from hey this is good to i want to get into how many cavities and all that but you know these large scale production tools so would they start with like single cavity molds and and then what what would be the yes we can move forward because i mean there is a it sounds like there is a significant investment up front to even get to yet we want to move forward.
It is absolutely yeah i mean when you get into the the scale of gillette and now proctor and gamble owning it the the scale is it is tough sometimes to wrap your head around the volume the volume of parts and the volume of money needed to support the activity and the and the business risk that is associated with making that that large an investment so there is a single cavity tooling and i said there is many concepts being developed and still going on that it is that it is phds in chemistry and and biology as well as mechanical design is so 1 of the when you see the the evolution of fins on the stop they have been around for a while but when the elastomer fins first started appearing on raises there is there is a there is an element of that that does guide that he lift up the hairs so that they are ready to be trimmed by the blade but 1 of the keys in this was not put out it did not sell as well in the advertising but 1 of the the keys to why the fins were so important is that it would as it was coming before the blade it would trigger that nerves in the face right before the blade to fire it would tickle it they would feel the sensation and then the blade would make the first blade would start to engage the cut before the the synapses of the nerve had a chance to recover and re fire so the the cutting sensation and that some of the the pulling in the tugging was reduced some of that comes from shopper blades being properly positioned but part of it is coming from the the fins triggering the the nerves and so you have phd scientists that looking at skin science and here science leading up to that so there is a significant investment and all that activity and then leading to single cavity tooling and understanding what goes into those early it is it is not a it is not a trial and error process it is a lot of structured discipline and and putting objective measures around around even at the concept stage saying that this this piece this long this wide at this position gives the result
Iinteresting so they will build the original injection mode tools is there ever a okay we need to go to another scale and maybe you will build AI do not know 4 cavity type thing or do you go use that original injection mo tool all the way up until you are ready to scale up
Yeah so a lot of times there will there will be work around what is going into being able to process because a lot of times the the dimensional control was so critical that a sample tool and a small press with a cold runner will not will be able to make a sample pot but there would be questions about well what happens if we put that in a 32 cavity tool where we will be able to fill these small little blade slots and have shop corners and control the dimensions and have adhesion between elastomer and hot plastic so there would be 4 or 8 cavity pilot molds made early on so that you would be making product changes to refine the design and the 4 cavity in the in the 4 cavities but you would be exploring process development and working with mold designers that would say okay yes we can we can manifold this we can hot gate it you know get it to a place where you can you know hide the gate so all of the aesthetics could be made so there was a lot of development going on on the process side
Sure sure and the 4 cavity tool is that would they use that to supply the the manufacturing engineers that are putting the lines together.
Yeah so a lot so a lot of the so for assembly equipment you know starting up some of these lines they could be anywhere from 1 to 10 assembly lines needed and dealing with you know machine builders there was always a need for hundreds of thousands of parts to debug assembly equipment so before you even got to the point of making production pot number 1 there were you could have millions of pots being molded for developing feed bus and and and and the discipline that was needed to keep track of that so you could have you could be at you know design rev 10 trying to understand the product and you make you know a 100 thousand pots for feed bowls and machine trials but very quickly the designers may have made 2 or 3 changes so now you are on to 2 or 3 revs down the road and you are debugging assembly machines with and so you would have to make sure you understood yeah this this rev 14 changes the product but it does it is internal it does not change feedable tracks pick and place units or if it does that you then had to so there is a lot of coordination of you know it was you know hundreds of people working on a project of this level so that so documentation discipline pots identify stuff that seems routine that you would say okay do not mix up the old pots with the new pots seems like a very basic rule but when you have you know you have old and then is it the new the new new and so having naming conventions identification disciplines shipping product samples around the world so they would have a machine builder and england or europe the west coast and and coding coordinating all of that.
You mentioned the design it got me thinking i can not wrap my head around how much fine refinement probably goes into this but i when the concept team i assume they they come up with the initial design from a cat standpoint and that is injection moldable at that point you could build a tool off of it how much would did the design change from that point until you went to the big 32 cavity tools
Yeah so the the structure that was in place at gillette there was there was concept there was design there was engineering which and then there was production and through each phase of that there was disciplined control and handoffs and it also related to the money released as well so that if you gave a million dollars to the first group and 10 million to the next group and 100 million to the 3rd group they had to hit their their hurdles and the there there was obviously there was more change the the the concept that came out that was this gives a very good shave was not a manufacturable design so the skills in the design group to really take that and get it into a things like just having straight poll molds versus molds ahead side polls are and figuring out if the first the first concept molds may have had a single cavity that came out with hard plastic and then you were able to put it into an elastomer o mould cavity to get it because i had not figured out how to how to do it in a multi a multi material mould as far as direction of polls and and injection of the material so that you may have had in the concept there were there were gate marks that would have been okay to prove out the quality of shave but would never have been acceptable to the the marketing team where the the design group really had to work to make that so there was a a significant change that the design group wrapped around the concept and then as it moved through the engineering and the scale up the the changes were slighter relative to draft angles and radii and details like that
interesting so there is a significant amount of work in the design phase then?
Yeah so it was significant design activity to get it to and and a lot of that had so there there were designers that were interacting with the the concept group so as concepts were advancing still not ready to get turned over there were designers work with them so they were they were understanding what the features were of the concept it was not a over the wall type of transfer there was a lot of integration and similar as the designers who refining the design and making it aesthetically pleasing with the with the commercial side of the organization getting input for colors and and i d shaping there were injection mold designers and stamping designers working and say okay if you if you make this thicker here or thinner here it will be easier to get through a high speed stamping die because at the end of the day it had to perform but it also had to be made at cost and that though so that if it did not hit both of those hurdles it was it was going to be kept work on until it did/
Yeah yeah and all the tools were once you got to scale they were all 32 cavity there was a variety depending on there was there were some like on a on a mock 3 it is 3 blades on a fusion it is 5 blades there is a so that you would have the blade support that had holds the blade you would have 5 of those so you would have you know a higher speed stamping guy that was bagging out 5 times as many supports as you were the housing that held the parts and then you had so oftentimes those were multi material so those would be 32 cavity molds and there were some simpler plastic pots that could be made in 64 cavity molds and they would need fewer mods but there is yeah the the larger factories would be making billions and billions of plastic pots and tell it.
Yeah and i assume you had multiple molds just because you had different manufacturing locations for logistics
Well just even in 1 factory you might have have 1032 cavity molds running 101 it was it is a it is a high volume business in terms of
Oh wow. That is crazy
There is there is certainly somewhere between you know 500 million and a billion depending on how you do your the counting of well there is there is different variants but you have really big numbers so that changes and mistakes would be very expensive so once a design advanced to production you could have a great idea for changing that design but it got corporate incorporated into the next 1 because what a lot of times what would what it would cost would be be significant so it would
Sure sure on the the for the over moulding was that were those 2 shot molds or did you literally have to mold the hard plastic and insert it into the the next mold to be able
Yeah any of the elastics were all multi shot,
Very cool so switching gears just a little bit as we kind of start to wrap up what are some of the i guess the trends that you see emerging in product development
So i have after gillette i worked at keurig and you know in the k cup appliance world and it was interesting observing gillette was a very old conservative company and it had good control processes in place and when i was at kur it was during their you know hockey stick expansion where they they could not make product fast enough it was they they started making home cake up appliances and they just just took off and observing that i guess in an early stage growth company observing that type of just not being able to make stuff fast enough and having incredible growth they were they were fortunate because they were selling so much and making so much they there was a little bit of lack of discipline discipline in the capital control new project and they and they came to market with several failed n pd launches that they had they came out with a product that was different than a k cup because k cup was coming off patent and they were worried about that they spent a lot of money and that was not a commercial success they went into the cold business trying to make a a soda coca cola type machine where they spent a lot of money and that was not a commercial success and so i observed that type of lack of discipline in it it is 1 thing to have a lack of discipline because if you have discipline you do not you do not get to launch and you do not grow but now having seen curry has matured they will not be going down that what i would say risky capital approach and so i do not know if it is necessarily it i see that a trend but as a difference between less mature companies that have to do whatever they can to try and survive and if they they they have to take risks and its success or failure based on the risk and then seeing the more mature organizations being more disciplined with their capital expansions and so i think it is an observation i do not know that that is necessarily i have seen enough to say it is a trend but just observing that differences of capital and new product discipline and there is some places that are just going to be running at risk in other places that are being more more disciplined
Yeah yeah that is really interesting so you have been doing this for a little while and reflecting on all the challenges and successes you have had what words of wisdom would you share with somebody looking to make a significant impact in the product development industry
I think when as i have evolved having more discipline to developing good specifications understanding from an engineering perspective what is working and and not working what what are the what is the science and engineering behind the performance features and really being disciplined to understanding that while also moving fast enough so that you do not miss market opportunities and and trying to to manage that delicate balance is is where you need to be and if you.
No no that yeah that makes sense awesome this has been great before we finish up is there anything else you would like to mention with regards to the product or product development in general.
No it is it is it is an enjoyable field to to live in watching observing successes seeing new stuff on the news understanding what is behind some of it oh so i say it is a it is an area that i am fortunate enough to have had a passion in and spent a lot of time doing and you know walking through stores and seeing stuff i worked on that in the past i you know there are there are probably 50 items i can walk through a CV s or a target and can identify places where i have you know worked where i went to see stuff made it is it is a it is been an interesting place to have a career in.
Yeah i totally agree i totally understand what you are saying you know years ago we did a bunch of juvenile products we still do a lot but there was a company we worked with and did a lot of like infant toys and anytime we were in target or something like that we would have to run over that aisle and just take a look and say yeah we did that and we did that and we did that and so it is always enjoyable to do so great ken this has been awesome i really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show
It is it is been fun I enjoy that conversation.