Custom project / Retail
A retractable strong enough for the shop floor, in a colour nobody stocked
Information cards on wicker furniture kept leaving with the furniture. The fix had to hold real weight, grip woven rattan, and go unnoticed against the display.
- Customer
- Lowe's, via a supply partner
- Sector
- Retail
- What we built
- All-black heavy-duty retractable
- Enquiry to delivery
- 6 months
Why nothing off the shelf worked
Display furniture needs its information card attached to it, not sitting loose beside it. On wicker, that is harder than it sounds: there is no flat surface to mount to, and anything that clips on can be unclipped and carried off. Lowe's had been through Key-Bak units and several other retractable ideas. None held the weight, and none of them blended into the display.
They came to us through our enterprise page, via an industrial supply partner, asking whether we would custom-design a retractable — they liked the strength of the Key-Bak mechanism but needed parts of it changed for this job.
What it had to do
- Hold
- 8 oz and still retract cleanly
- Attach
- Securely to wicker, resisting removal
- Finish
- All black, so the eye goes to the furniture
- Volume
- 150,000+ units
- Production
- 12 to 16 weeks
What we made
A retractable built around a mechanism that takes the weight and still returns, finished in black throughout, with a fixing that holds to woven furniture rather than clipping to it. The back plating was redesigned, as was the hook that carries the information card.
- Strength confirmed early. The colour was the problem from the start.
- Back plating and card hook redesigned, with a lot of phone calls in between.
- Approved in black — with one exception we had to be straight about.
One component could not be produced in anything but chrome. We found that out late, and told them rather than substituting something that would have failed differently. They took the trade-off.
Where it stands
Cards stay with the furniture, and stay readable, without pulling attention away from what is being sold. A first run this size followed by two more is the clearest signal we get that a design works.
It was not a smooth project. A finished batch shipped wrong and had to be put right. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise — custom work at this volume has failure points, and how they get handled is the thing worth judging a supplier on.