Heather Miller
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. “Target just signed up for a back-to-school program with an order for 75,000 lunch boxes,” he says. “It’s a huge manufacturing ramp-up to deliver by May.”
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 actually the first person I worked with that really introduced me to a lot of the cloud collaboration features in Fusion,” Ryan says. “Any time there is a GoBe project, I can jump into Fusion and get through some concept and refinement stages right away.”
“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.”
“I’ve tried many other software tools over the years. Fusion quickly became my favorite, and it’s been instrumental in building the business from the beginning.”
—Joseph Blanch, Co-founder and CEO, GoBe
Enjoying new success together
The collaboration between GoBe and Sample Studio has produced mutual success. “Working with Joseph and GoBe is one of the biggest opportunities of my career,” Ryan says. “Seeing designs go from concept to market is rare, and GoBe makes it happen.”
With the recent launch of the GoBe Cup and more products in development, the company continues to push boundaries. GoBe Lunchbox has even been named a finalist for the International Housewares Association’s Global Innovation Award, and it will be showcased in a major display at their upcoming conference in Chicago. “It’s incredible to see our designs recognized on a global stage,” Joseph says.