The next time you buy one of the famous Marmite or Colman’s Mustard products, spare a thought for the efforts of Pemberton Dear, the design consultants who used SolidWorks to create the squeezable bottles that are giving a new face to these well-known brands.

Peter Chapman’s Innovation Generation was commissioned by Unilever to manage all aspects of the re-packaging of these two household names. Peter Chapman selected Pemberton Dear to design the Marmite bottle and subsequently the Colman’s bottle.

Using SolidWorks, Pemberton Dear generated a series of design concepts that could be quickly circulated around the Unilever team for comments using E-drawings. Once a general direction had been chosen SolidWorks was able to quickly and accurately give substance to the technical and marketing challenges of the brief.

How to take an iconic shaped bottle and make it deliver a thin viscous substance in a clean and controllable manner?

Naturally, like ketchup, you start by turning it upside down and stand it on its cap; next you carefully sculpture the sides to encourage the movement of the bottle’s contents down towards the neck, while at the same time generating a large, single curved surface, front and back, to take the machine-applied labels. Then of course, you must ensure that the bottle can be easily squeezed by both the young and the old.

SolidWorks’ ability to shell a body with differing wall thicknesses came into its own here -1mm front and back, thickening to 2mm at the sides. It was essential that the bottle had “good suck-back”, to draw the Marmite yeast extract cleanly back into the body of the bottle, leaving the nozzle relatively clean time after time, while also consistently returning the bottle to its original shape after use.

“Basically when you stop squeezing, the bottle stops pouring” said Stephen Dear of Pemberton Dear, “It may seem obvious, but with a product like Marmite it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. SolidWorks helped in so many ways. From the first, everyone loved the photo-realistic renderings. The Unilever marketing team were able to access images quickly and use them in early focus groups. As comments came back I could quickly modify the solid model and send out updates in next to no time. Later on, due to pressing timescales, it was decided that we should short-circuit the usual model-making and rapid prototyping and go straight to pilot tooling. With SolidWorks I was confident that it wouldn’t be a problem”.

Apart from its ability to quickly deliver different shape iterations of the bottle and then move swiftly into tooling, SolidWorks gave Pemberton Dear the ability to work out and then generate label outlines for Unilever’s graphic agency, before any prototype bottles had been generated on the pilot tool, including the tricky tamper-seal that runs over the cap.

Pemberton Dear produced the labels as solids, apparently wrapped over the cap, for more renderings. This is the first time I’ve heard of SolidWorks being used this way, but after a bit of experimenting it worked really well. It allowed some decisions to be made ahead of samples, which was useful, considering the tight timescales.” commented Stephen Dear. “

I know now that SolidWorks can get me out of just about any tricky situation our clients throw at us. More and more it has become the backbone for our wide variety of design projects, which range from bottles like Marmite through to bathroom fitting and scientific instruments. SolidWorks copes with them all”