Objective: Design and build an entirely new production division dedicated specifically to decorating and building fidget spinners with a limited time to market.
Having no experience in the decoration and construction of this product, processes along with equipment and tooling needed to be developed from scratch. The decision was made to decorate the spinner caps digitally and separate from the bodies. This would require further steps on the backend but enable us to maximize the digital printing speeds by running dozens of caps in a single pass.
Tooling was designed and built in-house to facilitate the direct digital printing on the caps using laser cut trays. Building the finished product proved to be far more challenging. Affordable presses capable of pressure fitting caps to each side of the spinner bodies weren’t readily available. I managed to find plans for a pneumatic tabletop press being used for similar duties online. I took those plans and altered them to fit our exact needs and ordered the custom steel frame pieces. The various parts to build the finished presses were brought in from a national hardware supplier. Once I assembled the presses, I went about designing the custom tooling to fit the caps to the bodies. I laser cut and etched tooling to cradle the parts securely yet distribute the pressure from the press evenly.
Each machine was capable of producing over 1500 units/day. Having the ability to build more machines and add them to the line in hours rather than weeks meant increasing capacity whenever necessary. This division grew from initial idea to producing over 20,000 units/day in less than one month. Immediate cost savings were well over $40,000 on the in-house built presses alone.