Air Wick Freshmatic 2020

Reckitt is a global leader in home-fragrance with Air Wick, a brand DCA has worked with for over a decade. As a key partner in Reckitt’s multi-agency design community, we are committed to constantly evolving Air Wick products to ensure the design meets the changing needs of consumers while treading more lightly on the planet.

Our latest redesign of Freshmatic, Air Wick’s automatic spray variant, does just this; a transformation that improves the aesthetics, efficiency and sustainability of the device.

Visually more appealing to its target consumers, the redesign uses significantly less plastic, is almost 30% lighter to ship, and is re-engineered to be more efficient to run, slashing the number of batteries needed by half.

Importantly, we’ve helped Air Wick deliver an exciting new variant in a traditional air-care segment, reinforcing Freshmatic’s positioning as the original, category defining format.

This is a story that showcases the benefits of a truly multidisciplinary approach - it demonstrates how engineering and industrial design work together to improve an established product, complemented by the incorporation of crucial consumer feedback throughout the process.

It also highlights the beauty of a long-term client relationship - a partnership between Reckitt and DCA that began 15 years ago, when we were asked to help bring one of their products to the shelf for the first time. Since then, we have worked on each iteration of Freshmatic, evolving and fine-tuning the device to help maintain its market share.

Freshmatic’s automatic spray format is popular with traditional users of home-fragrance, but it’s a category now rife with newer entrants and private label battling for market share.

Our brief then, was to support Reckitt in continuing to lead this busy mid-market segment by driving improvements in three key areas. The first of these was to meet Reckitt’s ambition to boost product sustainability. The second was to reduce production costs through a more efficient design, without compromising the quality of the user’s experience. The third was to make the design more visually appealing to its target consumers.

We set to work by bringing the best of our engineering and design expertise to the table. Mechanical, electronics and software engineers rubbed shoulders with industrial designers in a genuinely collaborative, multidisciplinary approach to improving the design.

A technical evaluation of the engine found that by redesigning the gearbox we could reduce the battery count by 50% – therefore hitting cost reduction and sustainability objectives in one go. Further assessment proved that the performance of the device would not be compromised by the use of just one battery. Finally, its smaller size gave us the opportunity to use less plastic and offered aesthetic benefits too.

Research shows that home-fragrance consumers want to express themselves through the design and scent of the products they buy. It’s a category influenced by visual design trends so our solution needed to reflect this. Additionally, the larger size of many competitor products is often a barrier to purchase so our new design for Freshmatic makes it the smallest product on the market. Along with its softer curves and flower motif which hides the spray within its petals, the design now has the looks its target users find attractive.

The result meets all elements of the brief: a visually appealing and sustainable redesign that costs less to make, uses over 17.2% less plastic, is 28.9% lighter to ship, weighs 25% less than its nearest competitor and is more cost effective to run.

This positive outcome was endorsed by our client, David Bermejo, Reckitt’s Freshmatic marketer: ‘Understanding our customers’ desires for the redesign was essential. […] the new design allows the product to take centre stage in the home environment, something to be proudly displayed, not hidden away. Reducing the amount of plastic is also hugely positive and part of our ambition to make the device more responsible. This has also reduced the shipping weight […] which significantly reduces C02 emissions and consumption of fossil fuels.’