The brief was a mirror ball in the shape of a whisky bottle, made 1,000 times. For a moment we wondered whether it was a serious request. It was, so we started working out how to make it.
Designing for production. We looked at injection moulding for the plated part with our partners and briefed our in-house design team. We 3D printed the first covers to check that they fitted the bottle perfectly, and that the faceted detail would mould well without adding unnecessary cost.
A looks-like prototype. Once the design was fixed, the client wanted to see a final looks-like prototype before commissioning the injection mould tooling. We machined it from acrylic, polished every facet, and vacuum plated all the parts to a mirror finish. The order for tooling and production followed soon after.
Production and assembly. The plated injection mouldings were produced, then assembled and labelled onto the whisky bottles in our workshop, ready to add a little sparkle to a thousand bar tops.
Related: Design development · Design for manufacture · Production workshop
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