Fender - instant face-lift 

This fender was designed for Wanco Traffic safety company. 

The main goal was to show how a single component update can change the entire appearance of the product. This change to an existing product line brought cost savings to the client, elevated the overall product appearance, and freed up the overloaded powder-coating and welding stations at the manufacturing facility. 

​The original version of the product featured a very small round rear light at the bottom of the arrow board trailer. The lights were in the way of the forklift and were getting damaged sometimes by the shipping operators. ​

​The decision was made to incorporate the tail light into the fender. This move put the tail light at a higher level, making the product more visible on the roads and safer for the drivers behind. We decided to use a high-quality LED taillight to make the overall feel of the final product more premium. 

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Since the lifetime of the LED tail light is longer than the trailer life, I proposed to use steel rivets, which are designed for plastic, to permanently attach the light to the fender. This made them theft-proof. 

The rear side of the fender with an unused feature for the LED taillight received the Company logo plate to make this product more elegant and finished. This plate was molded together with the fender in the same mold cavity, It was designed to be snapped off by the installer - This way it's always supplied with the fender and it gave us additional cost savings.

The last detail that I pushed for was a Pad-Printed cluster of international caution icons and warnings. On the previous metal version of the fender, they used adhesive-back decals, which did not last long in the harsh environment where these trailers are usually placed. I knew that the decals would not adhere well to the plastic fender, so we created a custom artwork file that was pad-printed at the fender manufacturing facility. This allowed us to remove an extra step on the assembly line and reduce the number of components on the line.

Project duration - part time 3 months.