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Goodwill Trophy, an established manufacturer of trophies and giftware, is adapting a high-tech design led approach in a traditional supplier driven industry.
The company teamed up with the University of Wolverhampton in a DTI funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) which saw product design graduate Helen Hurricks placed at Goodwill Trophy.
Helen's brief was to change Goodwill Trophy from a supplier driven company to a design driven organisation with it's own strong identity and to enable Goodwill to design and react more quickly to new opportunities.
A key factor in realising the above brief was the adoption of new 3D CAD technologies in what is essentially a very conservative industry.
Helen considered Art Cam, Solid Works, Powershape and Freeform but decided on Rhino after attending a two day level one training class run by Simply Rhino. "I liked Rhino's ability to create complex organic forms easily - I was able to work in an unconstrained way without the software getting in the way of creativity" says Helen who now uses Rhino and V-Ray for Rhino alongside Poser and Photoshop.
After recommending that Goodwill purchased Rhino, Helen chose Simply Rhino to provide additional on-site training and consultancy.
The KTP project has proved extremely successful and has produced clearly measurable results. In the year preceding the KTP programme, only 32 out of a total of 235 Goodwill products were their own design whereas in the following year this rose to 156 out of 231. Similarly product design concept generation has increased by 61% in the last year.
"We simply have more control of our designs now", says Helen "and we can communicate so much better with our suppliers by sending them the 3D data directly - Rhino's extensive import and export filters mean that whatever software our suppliers use we can send and receive accurate data"
www.goodwilltrophy.co.uk
