Patented Cosmetic Airbrush System
This project was initiated by Manhattan-based cosmetic company Temptu, which desperately wanted to expand its operations from professional make-up market into consumer market.
Their questions was simple and very specific: - Can you INVENT a new patentable airbrush, which will be very easy to use, intended to be used by women at home?
Our answer was: - Of course we can! We have done this before and we will do it again. For you.
Another challenge for Temptu was tooling and manufacturing. This company has never been involved in actual production, did not have a single engineer or designer in their staff. They were buying few models of metal airbrushes on "open market" in Asia and selling them in the USA as part of their product assortment. Now they had to actually make their own product.
We took this company to one of our long-time partnering factories in Dongguang, China and set up tooling, production and components sourcing for them. We also supervised all initial pilot production runs, troubleshot all product models and left only when production was running smooth at high speed and quality.
Gennadi Fedorov, founder of Atus Design, had built his very first airbrush, or rather a simple sprayer, when he was 11 years old back in Russia. He was fond of model aviation, was designing, building and flying his own models of Control-Line and Radio-Control airplanes. It wasn't always easy to buy so needed equipment in Soviet Russia in those days. So, the natural decision that Gennadi came to - build it yourself! At the same age Gennadi started attending art school and became very fond og creating some of his artworks using airbrushing technique. By the age of 18 Gennadi designed and built for his personal use five different spraying devices, ranging from very delicate and precise models to larger and more powerful for spraying larger surfaces. He mostly used compressors, which he had taken off old refrigerators.
Work on Temptu airbrush had begun when Gennadi received a phone call from Michael Benjamin, Temptu's president. Michael had a vision for his company to move out of a narrow pro-artists' niche market and expand its operations into consumer market. He knew what he wanted and where he wanted to be, but did not know how to get there. Michael knew that he would need to find the right inventor to do the right job. He started looking through USPTO database and came across patents of 2004 for battery-powered portable airbrush for arts and crafts for kids with Gennadi Fedorov name as inventor who was residing in New Jersey.
Work started with market and analogs research and revision and initial ideation by creating hand sketches. Next step was creating sculpted foam models for evaluation of ergonomics, shape and overall sizing.
