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Executive summary

Market Review

Anthropological Observations and Interview at wine bars

To see how the corkscrews are used in a professional environment we went to a wine bar on Walnut Street in Shadyside. We’ve stayed there to watch the waiter work, how she opens the bottles and then asked her and the tenant some questions. They told us some interesting information.

First of all they had to types of corkscrew. The first type was a wing corkscrew. They said that they don’t use it that much compared to the connoisseurs’ one (wine key). According the tenant the key has the advantage to be really easy to use and light. It’s easy for the waiter to carry it with her which is an important feature because most of the bottles are opened at the tables. Despite these advantages the wine key it need some practice to be used correctly and quickly (the waitress told us that when she started to work she practiced at home). Moreover sometimes the lever doesn’t stand correctly on the bottle lip, especially if this one is round, which is really inconvenient and could leads in the worst case to spill the wine on the customer. The last problem that the waitress had with this type of corkscrew is that after having opened some bottles the hinge that hold the lever get a bit loose which leads to a bad alignment of the screw.

Another point that we see during our observation is that when the waitress cut the foil she doesn’t cut it from the side of the bottle but from top. She sticks the blade on the top of the bottleneck and then cut the upper part with a circular motion. See next picture :

Way foil is cut in restaurants

She also told us that the knife from the wine key gets blunt pretty fast.

Concerning the bottles themselves, 30 percent of the ones drunk in the bar were closed with caps. What is more when they open a bottle just for a glass they reclose it by putting the cork back in. Usually a bottle doesn’t stay open more than a day.

The last subject that we approach was electrical corkscrew. The waitress told us that her mother has one because it didn’t require any force to open the bottle, which is what elderly people are looking for. However she said that this type of corkscrew seems really complicated and that it takes way too long to pull the cork out.

We carried on our market study by going to a couple of other restaurants. We asked them the following questions:

What type of corkscrew do you use?
Why?
Have you ever encountered any trouble with the type of corkscrew?
Do you see any way of improving the corkscrew you use?
Have you ever tried this type of corkscrew? (picture of our product)

Here are the answers we obtained:

simple one (foldable screw + handle), “the 2 handles one is definitely the worst”
2 inches we can use to open the bottle so we don’t have to screw in a little bit, lift it up and then screw all the way down to finally being able to take the cork out. On top of that it’s very easy to carry around
The back knife is not sharp enough and sometimes it’s tough to open bottles closed with “dry cork”
Sharper knife
“NO! It looks complicated”

And:

Simple one (foldable screw + handle)
Cheapest one and easy to carry around
No trouble on plastic cork but it can be more difficult with dry cork (break the cork)
No real improvement
“Yes, my parents have one of those. I hate it because I broke it (laugh). Probably because the lever arm was made out of plastic”

We can easily conclude that the wine key is the most used bottle opener in that market (Bars and Restaurants). The main reasons for that is that this item is very reliable and easy to carry around. On top of that, its price is very low compared to other bottle opener. Therefore, if we want to focus on this market, we should definitely thing about those criteria while designing our product.

Survey

Expert interviews

Stakeholder needs

Competitor Products

User reviews on internet

The main problems that the users encounter with the lever arm corkscrew is that after several use the screw don’t work properly. Most of the time it turns on the way back up which doesn’t pull the cork out of the bottle, the corkscrew become useless. What also appear in the reviews is that this kind of corkscrew is heavy and not easy to operate.

'Heavy, awkward to handle and broke after twenty uses.'

What also came out of the reviews is that the motion is not really smooth. This type of corkscrew is mainly designed for the high-end market and that is why bad tolerences are not acceptable for this type of bottle opener.

'In my opinion, this is a very poorly made opener. The manufacturing/assembly tolerances are very sloppy and the action of the opener is not smooth.'

On the other hand some reviews are quite positive about the corkscrew saying that it is easy to use and require less force than a usual corkscrew. This may be an important criteria for eldrely people or disabled. However its complexity may prevent this type of customers to use it.

About the wine key, the comments were that it is light, easy to use and quick. However one of the main problem that the user encounter is that after some time the hinge get loose and the alignment of the screw is not perfect anymore. That makes it tougher to open the bottle and stresses more the corks, which can even leads to break it. But all in all the review were really positive

Concerning the prong cork the reviews say it is difficult to use but once you got used to it, it is easy. On top of that some review were saying that it may be really useful to open broken corks or old bottles,. However many reviews point out that because of the prongs thickness it is very likely to push the cork in the bottle.

'It may be a little difficult for new beginner to use. After a while, you will enjoy the fun. It is especially good for open the older bottles'
'...the prongs are so thick that it has pushed in many a cork. Aaargh. Don't buy this. Not worth the aggravation.'

Design Concepts

Grappling mechanism

What came out of the anthropological observation and the interviews at the wine bars is that the wine key has several problems. The important points are the following :

The hinge get loose and the corkscrew doesn't work properly anymore
The lever is not steady on the bottle lip and may slip
The quicker it is to open the bottle the better

From these two observations we came up with the idea to redesign the wine key. The part that takes most of the time during the opening process is to screw the cork in. That's why we came up with the idea to design a wine bottle openener that doesn't use a srcew. We came up with a technique which main principle is to insert a thin piece of metal between the cork and the bottleneck. The thin bar has a hinge with a spring-loaded foldable part at the end. Once the bar is deep enough the small part fold at 90 degrees. When the user pull the bar back up using a simple handle. The spring-loaded part take the cork with on the way up.

With this technique the cork is not damaged. This also means that it is really unlikely to break the cork while opening the bottle. Moreover this technique is quick because it doesn't require a spinning motion. Which could be very useful for the bar and restaurant market.

This technique as three main problems :

It may be tough to insert the whole mechanism between the cork and the bottle neck.
As the mechanism as to be thin, the hinge that links the spring-loaded part must be small. On the other hand ith as to be resistant because it will undergo an important force.
The force to apply is quite important because there is no lever arm that reduce the rquired force to take the cork out.

SKETCH

Barbed arrow corkscrew

Arm supported lever arm corkscrew

Grippling bottleneck lever arm

Twisting motion lever arm

Pugh Chart

For this pugh chart we decided to compare our design ideas to the standard wine key used in the market we're interesting in.

Pugh Chart - Wine Bottle Opener
Description		Standard Wine key	Arrow	Twist + bottle older	Extendable lever arm	Glove lever arm	Spring loaded hook
Sketch
Criteria	Weight	Datum	Design 1	design 2	Design 3	Design 4	Design 5
Price	1	0	+	-	--	--	++
Size	3	0	0	-	--	-	+
Durable	3	0	-	+	0	+	--
Complements opportunity	1	0	++	0	0	0	0
Transportable	3	0	0	-	-	-	+
Weight	2	0	0	0	-	-	+
Reliable	3	0	-	+	++	++	--
Safe	1	0	--	++	+	++	0
Efficient	3	0	-	++	++	++	-
Easy to use	2	0	+	++	++	++	0
Classy	2	0	-	0	0	0	-
+		0	5	18	17	21	10
0		24	8	5	6	3	4
-		0	13	7	13	10	17
Net score		0	-8	11	4	11	-7

Gantt Chart

Appendix : 100 Ideas

Team member roles

Alex Clement : Brain Storming
César Daguet : Pugh Chart
Gautam Poddar : Sketches
Ross Farquharson : Stakeholders, Scenarios
Claude Muller : Market study

@@ Line 46: / Line 46: @@
 ==Expert interviews==
 ==Stakeholder needs==
+==Competitor Products==
 =User reviews on internet=

Wine bottle opener opportunity