Manufacturing
Early 2020 : Delivery of our second mould to increase production!
Our industrial story:
We first designed our cat and made 3D-engineering plans thanks to the help of our great designer-in-chief Miren...
Miren Lasnier, designer, and some of the very first sketches
But we wanted the real thing, to get our friends to test it! So we found Gilles, the 3D-Printing master, who made 5 prototypes for us in vegetable plastic with his additive technology machine: Ty Shee Zen was born!
Gilles Salou with the bronze-color prototype
Watch the 3D printing video:
With our prototypes, we asked some of our friends to do 7-days trials and to give us honest feedbacks... which were clearly encouraging! And we soon realized that Ty Shee Zen was so nice and fun that our friends did not want to have it only in the toilet, but also everywhere else in the house and even in their garden! They used it for decorative purpose, as a footrest, chair, child toy ...
So we had to move to the industrialisation phase.
After a lot of research, we found a French factory, expert in rotomoulding: ANVI, which is ISO certified.
With them, we prepared the technical specifications of our first series, insisting on the quality of the material and the render. After several hours of cooking, the process will require 20 minutes of hand finishing per cat.
Jean-Noel and David at ANVI, trying to put our crazy ideas into practice!
A critical part of the manufacturing process is the design and production of the molds, that have been cast in aluminium:
Finally, the factory has produced a first pre-series, to test the shape, material and render. Below the very first batch: