Consumer products company GoBe began with an all too familiar (and typically frustrating) experience on a family car ride.  

Co-founders Joseph Blanch and Solanda Moran-Blanch were driving with their toddler, who was ready for some snacks. Solanda had cut up fresh strawberries, but she couldn’t just give their daughter the whole bowl since it would inevitably get spilled. Contorting her arm and handing each individual strawberry slice to her in the backseat was difficult—not to mention it disrupted an interesting conversation they were having. Then came an a-ha moment for Joseph, who is a mechanical engineer. 

For quite a while, Solanda had been asking Joseph to design a snack tray with compartments. This one car ride connected all the dots and the need for a cover. “I spent an afternoon mocking up a concept in Autodesk Fusion, animating how it could move,” he recalls. When he showed it to Solonda, her excited reaction confirmed they were onto something big.  

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Creating an entirely new business

GoBe’s first product—the Snack Spinner—is a covered snack tray with a push button in the center to release the opening for a certain compartment. The product took off and is now available worldwide, both digitally and in brick-and-mortar stores, including Target and Walmart. With the success of the Snack Spinner, GoBe has continued innovating with a new take on a sippy cup and a lunch box that is proving to be incredibly popular.  

Unlike traditional lunch boxes, the GoBe Lunchbox is complete with a carrying handle, a bento compartment, and a secure holding area for a Snack Spinner. But the lunch box didn’t start out the way it’s available today. It was reimagined after extensive customer feedback. Initially designed as a stackable container with a Snack Spinner on top, the first concept, called the “Lunch Stack,” received praise but just wasn’t quite hitting the mark. 

“Parents loved it—but they wouldn’t send it to school with their kids because it didn’t fit in their backpacks,” Joseph says. “So we went back to the drawing board.”  

Months of iterations led to the GoBe Lunchbox, which has been a massive success both online and with major brick-and-mortar retail. Last year alone, Target signed up for a back-to-school program with an order for 75,000 lunch boxes.  

Using Autodesk Fusion to fuel success

A key factor in GoBe’s rapid growth and success is its use of Autodesk Fusion. Joseph used SolidWorks for years but switched to Fusion when he started the company. “I didn’t have $10,000 a year to spend on SolidWorks,” he says. “Fusion made sense financially, but once I started using it, I realized how much more it could do.” 

The cloud-based platform allowed seamless collaboration between Joseph and Ryan Krause, industrial designer and co-founder of Sample Studio, with Tyler Anderson. Since the beginning, Ryan has worked closely with GoBe for industrial design.  

“Joseph was one of the first founders I worked with who really embraced engineering and industrial design working in parallel,” Ryan says. “With Fusion’s cloud workflow, we’re not passing files back and forth, we’re shaping the product together in real time, which lets us move through concept and refinement stages much more intentionally.” 

“What’s great is we can all open up the file together and look at it at the same time with the same level of fidelity—or we can each look at different parts at the same time,” he continues. “Joseph can edit and make a new version, and then I’ll go in. With Fusion, the way we can collaborate is seamless. Plus, they are in North Carolina, and I’m in California. It’s been awesome to see how easy working in CAD can be with Fusion in that way.”  

Fusion’s CAM features were valuable in prototyping, especially at the very beginning when Joseph started out with the Snack Spinner. “I had access to CNC machines, and Fusion made it easy to program tool paths and create precise prototypes,” he says. 

Another advantage of Fusion is its intuitive interface and flexibility. “The form tool is incredibly powerful, and the way Fusion structures part trees and history just makes sense,” Joseph says. “Being cloud-based also means that our entire team can collaborate from anywhere, whether it’s with Sample Studio here in the U.S. or working with manufacturers overseas.” 

Enjoying new success together

The collaboration between GoBe and Sample Studio has produced mutual success. “Working with Joseph and GoBe has been a defining partnership in my career,” Ryan says. “It’s rare to shepherd a product from early concept through prototyping, tooling, and onto major retail shelves, and that full journey is what makes being a designer so rewarding.” 

With the recent launch of the GoBe Wonder Cup for toddlers moving from sippy cups to open cups and more products in development, the company continues to push new boundaries. 

“It’s incredible to think all of this just started with a car ride,” Joseph says. “But here we are with global sales and distribution and making parents’ and caregivers’ lives a little bit easier. That’s the real reward.”