The 2018 mouse sander is a reimagined production design of the 1998 original. BLACK+DECKER have iteratively replaced the original over time with varying success, but the 1998 original had still been on sale since its launch. That was, until the latest release.

We looked at parallel industries to find examples of classic products that have been successfully updated for todays market. most inspiration was derived from the automotive industry, mainly the mini when it kept its core identity when redesigned in the late 90’s.

Part of a wider range of low cost DIY products being developed at the time. Through competitor analysis we noted that even at the lowest price points, new products on the market had ergonomic and vibration dampening overmold, something the the out of date products we were redesigning didn’t have. Because the project was very cost sensitive, we could only use twin shot overmold where it was necessary. We took learnings from other product divisions to propose an overmolded insert piece into the design. This was done with the aims of; reducing the size of the overmold tooling, add a premium silver colour break into the design and to inmold the brand logo into a large area in the overmold. the traditional method of overloading was chosen by the engineering team in the end.