When the low-carb movement was reshaping how people thought about food, spiralising was having a moment. The problem was that most kitchen offerings were large countertop gadgets, fine for households already converted to the cause, but far too much commitment for everyone else.
Zyliss asked us to find a way in for that majority.
Our consumer research uncovered something counterintuitive.
Spiralisers use exposed blades and most people assumed the primary barrier to adoption would be safety. It was not. It was the faff. Cleaning, switching between cuts and wasting the residual stump were the real friction points.
We designed around all three. The result was a handheld three-piece spiraliser with a squeeze-to-engage thread mechanism that gave a consistent result every time, a flip-over blade that switched between courgetti and ribbons in a single move, and a body that separated with a released grip and rinsed clean under the tap in seconds.
Simple enough to use without thinking. Effective enough to change behaviour. Helping an innovative brand do a beautiful thing does not always mean making a beautiful object. Sometimes it means finding the insight nobody else was looking for.
The spiraliser became one of Zyliss's most commercially successful products of that period, validating both the trend opportunity and the design approach. More importantly it established something between RODD and the Zyliss team that proved more valuable than any single product: a shared belief that the most useful design insight is rarely the one you set out to find. That conviction shaped everything we went on to do together, a body of work rooted in genuine consumer understanding and the belief that beautiful things work better when they start with honest observation.
