Symphony Duet i-S  

Cool Cooler Tech, Made Ultra-portable | Symphony Duet  

The Focus 

• Customer need focused on opportunities in the air cooler market, where appliances would cater to people’s cooling needs based on their lifestyle. This study led to the concept of a truly portable ‘personal cooler’ range, that compacts for storage into half the space. 

• Modernity, portable and premium were key propositions around which design elements would revolve.  

• Industrial Design for this cooler needed to be unorthodox, providing new solution scenarios and mitigating the consumer need of multi-location use, that it had to remedy.  

The Design  

• The Design team innovated a compact to transport, compact to store and highly portable tabletop air cooler 

• Overall form successfully deviated from the conventional, chunky cuboidal structure that has now become the industry standard, opting for an obelisk appearance, resonating with the contemporary lifestyle needs or urban consumers 

• Symphony Duet i-S now marks a definite departure, with cool features creating a new industry segment for tabletop cooling where a new host of applications can be explored 

The Story 

Symphony’s association with Elephant is a long one, resulting in a range of successful product launches over the years. The two teams came together this time to design the structure for an unconventional cooler that would cater to an entirely new segment.  

So, when it was decided to cater to an entirely new use-case scenario, the teams ventured deep inside people’s homes to look for insights to drive the new range. The story of this cooler, in essence, is the story of ‘personal, tabletop’ cooling that has been hitherto less explored. Despite rapid improvements in general cooler technology, most coolers aren’t exactly space efficient.  

The first challenge in our quest was to look at a long-serving need of the consumers to provide a truly portable device that seamlessly dovetails into the consumer lifestyle.  The second challenge stoked us to squeeze maximum cooling power into the frame so that it functions as a bona fide cooler despite its compact size and yet remains highly mobile. 

The tertiary challenge led us to design engineer a compact package that was miserly on footprint, saved stove-away space and yet packed all the modern, tech-savvy user features that consumer would consider as befitting their urban life.  

The Obelisk  

The cuboidal shape has been the industry standard for coolers for a long time and the attitude of why fix something that isn’t broken? is still prevalent – and why not? Most use-cases for coolers are perfectly fulfilled, so change is a matter of perspective. But this shape is far from ideal if we consider bringing to the cooler to the tabletop space.  

The format itself is unheard of. The cuboid does not exactly sit well in versatile indoor use-case, like in the kitchen or a small shop counter. Lastly, the question is also to do with aesthetics – a cuboidal cooler simply looks out of place in a world now dominated by sleek tabletop devices, driven by minimalistic design. The obelisk presented us with an easy form factor, conveniently moving between a living room to a kitchen and from a balcony to a bedroom with ease. 

Filling water on one’s desktop where spillage is a possibility is a big no-no, apart from the fact that coolers aren’t silent, noiseless machines. Ability of the cooler to be carried with ease and installed either on a table platform or on a floor pedestaled had to be done elegantly and with the comfort of a picnic basket.  

The team deemed that the best structure that could retain the functions of a bona fide cooler while also remedying most of these concerns was an obelisk. From the outside, it possesses a monolithic look where in a first for coolers, the tank is converging instead of diverging and the 2 parts of the tank are attached via a different industrial process that involves ultrasonic welding. The simple click open pedestal feet, add stability in use mode, whereas they conveniently snug in, along with the entire cooler inside the pedestal base once the air cooler work is deemed finished for the season. 

One form, two functions bring a whole new dynamic to this crowded segment of products. Thus, we took an unconventional bottom-to-top approach towards manufacturing to accommodate our design approach.  

Futurism in an Antiquated World 

Our new structure ensures that the Symphony Duet stands alone in its category of unobtrusive, elegant coolers that seamlessly blend into an assortment of modern gadgets. The core device is merely 1.5 feet tall and composed of light yet durable materials, ensuring unmatched portability. Working as both a pedestal fan and a full-fledged cooler with additional attachments like a pump, filling water is as painless as possible while also eliminating it from the equation altogether if necessary.  

Additionally, the cooler fits inside the pedestal when being transported – making it a nifty add-on for both, supply chain dynamics as well as general portability since it saves around 50% of the space.   

The material finish and an assortment of features add a premium feel to the device and cater to the modern consumer that expects a fair degree of customization and ease of use. The addition of a touch panel variant is an extension of this path-breaking approach, where the pedestal adds modularity, allowing for adaptation on the fly. The top-end model also incorporates a handle and cool mood glow light feature, providing the right value additions.  

Colour choices like electric blue further differentiate the product, while the darker overtones and finishes complement other contemporary lifestyle gadgets that we use every day. The entire cooler compacts and snug fits into a unique to the category tube packaging. 

From a client servicing perspective, the team at Elephant managed to deliver on a vision and not just a market brief, allowing for further iterations with a fluid outlook in mind. However, the larger impact on the industry was perhaps more satisfying, where this indicated new possibilities for us as far as the evolution of the cooler was concerned – designed to be retailed through e-commerce, modern retail, and international markets, this brought on a new journey for Symphony Ltd while also making this a noteworthy milestone for us!