I’ve been working on a number of new products for YOLO Colours over the past few months. By “working” I mean designing the products, making prototypes for testing, getting tooling made (some in-house, some outsourced), sourcing suppliers for various components, and eventually manufacturing and assembling the products for YOLO.
YOLO Colours is Lisa‘s new company. Most of YOLO’s products will be rotomoulded or have a rotomoulded part as a main component.
The first of the new YOLO products to go into production is this Compost Tumbler. The model pictured here is the smallest size (45 litres), which is available as a single or double unit. It is now in full production, and it is the first of three sizes. The medium size (about 100 litres) will be launched in the next two or three weeks, with the large size (200 litres) following a bit later.
I enjoyed working on the tumbler, as it is a solution for a real-life problem. The problem: how to turn your kitchen waste and garden scraps into something useful, instead of dumping it all on a landfill site? The solution: an enclosed plastic rotomoulded unit with moulded-in fins, that can easily be rotated manually to mix and aerate the compost-in-progress inside. This design turns kitchen waste and garden scraps into compost within a couple of weeks.
The design brief that I received for this YOLO product:
- Design a rotomoulded plastic shell with moulded-in fins to turn, mix and aerate the inside matter.
- Design a rotomoulded plastic lid to keep compost inside and rain outside.
- Design hinges to fit the lid to the shell.
- Design brass moulded-in inserts, to which hinges and latches can be attached.
- Design a robust steel frame that can be free standing as well as wall mounted.
Above are CAD renderings to show what I designed, and at the bottom is a picture of the final product with some pointers to show the various features. Now that the tumbler is going in full production, the next phase kicks in: optimising the production process and implementing continuous quality control.
