Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

A stunning new Dishmatique

In a nostalgic post about memories past, Burningbird fondly recalled late April, 2002—mentioning me in the context of two of my favorite tools:

That was the time that Jonathon started his Dishmatique craze, leading to the Sudsy Men of Weblogging. I beat Jonathon’s rollout to MT by a couple of hours, and it seemed like there was a virtual cascade of webloggers switching to Movable Type at that time.

Today, as if on cue, Allan Moult discovered the Dishmatique Flex, the most significant advance in dishwashing technology since the original Dishmatique. Get rid of the Scotch-Brite Dishwand with Scrubber Brush, discard the Liquid Detergent Dish Washer, jettison the Gemco Li’l Scrubber, ditch the Bottlematique, dispense with the Easy-Do Bathmatique, abandon the Quickie… consign them all to the dustbin of dishwashing history.

But I’m not going to steal Allan’s thunder. Let him tell you the whole story.

I did, however, turn up some fascinating information about the development of the Dishmatique Flex. Though the new device hasn’t yet been indexed by Google—it’ll be there next month, for sure—buried within all the weblog entries in the search results for “Dishmatique” was a case study by Hyphen Design, the company that designed the new model.

It took Hyphen four months to run the Dishmatique Flex—which they call the Easy-do Dishmatique—through the six design phases: concept generation, styling and ergonomics, concept model, feature innovation, engineering, and production assistance.

For a moment, when I saw Allan’s post, I’d fantasized that Easy-do had discovered our blogging conversation and used our ideas as part of their brief to Hyphen Design. It appears not, if you believe this [annotated] account of the design process:

Hyphen took an existing washing up brush [the Dishmatique] and added patented, marketable features [check Allan’s post to see what they are], while keeping the cost of manufacture low. The product is now selling in supermarkets worldwide [including Woolworths in Hobart], and we are working with Easy-do on a range of future products.

Daniel Neuman, Managing Director, Easy-do Products - “We work very well with Hyphen. They learned from our experience initially, then gave us the fresh ideas to take our product forward. We also have the confidence from the support when it comes to manufacturing.

There’s no Woolworths close to my home so I’ll have to wait until Tuesday, when I’m in the city, to find my own Dishmatique Flex. And, as much as I respect Hyphen’s design, I firmly believe that we could teach Easy-do a thing or two about the Cluetrain.

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