Smoothie and juice bars have become a $2.2 billion industry, projected to rise 2% annually on average over the next five years.
To remain competitive, commercial smoothie providers need to combine aesthetics and performance to provide the best blending machinery on the market. Their quest is to create the Ferrari of blenders.
Founded in 1921, Vitamix (a privately held, family-run company) creates world-class blenders that can emulsify large quantities of produce, seemingly effortlessly. Their machines quickly turn whole fruits and vegetables into creamy, healthy, and delicious beverages.
And with nearly 100 years of history, Vitamix has become a trailblazer in product design innovation, garnering over 50 patents and numerous engineering awards. A machine so well loved by consumers, it even gets hugs.
Smooth Functionality: Vitamix and PTC
How does a 93 year old company remain innovative? Simple: with PTC Creo.
Vitamix needed top-tier engineering capabilities to maintain innovative momentum and create products that are both aesthetically pleasing, dependable and durable. Vitamix accomplishes all this with PTC’s Creo MCAD design suite. Creo helps them drive prototypes that enable faster design decision-making, while PTC Windchill lets them easily manage their project and product data in a clean interface.
Vitamix has already dramatically improved efficiency and collaboration between the industrial design and engineering teams, with design time subsequently down by 25%. (Meanwhile, 4 million households in the United States have Vitamixes, while the company’s repair department has only four employees.)
Vitamix’s Industrial Design Manager Jack Gee says their company relies on PTC software for a multitude of reasons:
- PTC Creo helps Vitamix improve workflows as well as speed up modeling for their teams.
- PTC Creo Flexible Modeling Extension lets them make rapid design changes.
- PTC Creo Parametric’s Freestyle capability helps them design complex surfaces easily.
- PTC Creo Parametric allows their team to skip the methodology that goes into creating a shape and instead focus on the shape itself.
By unlocking more of PTC’s potential, engineer and design teams can further leverage PTC Creo and Windchill to increase the number of new product introductions and reduce overall time-to-market by 30%. And they can accomplish all this without compromising the high quality of their designs.
Now, that’s smooth.
For more information about Vitamix, visit www.vitamix.com. Or shop Vitamix online at Williams- Sonoma.