The flick of your wrist, the sound of the line spinning out and your favorite lure hitting the placid water. It’s easy to enjoy those moments when you’re using a product that just works. For over 60 years Zebco fishing reels have been the first introduction to fishing for many and Zebco Brands have expanding over that time to be the favorite gear for many an avid fisherman. Their designs for their fishing products are refined and the visual you see communicate the beauty and function like no other. Zebco Brands uses KeyShot during the design process, creating visuals to sell concepts, work with manufacturing and speed development of product shots for web and print imagery. Industrial Design Manager, Clark McCune, of Zebco tells us more about how KeyShot has helped.
Zebco / Clark McCune
Modeling software used: Pro/ENGINEER
Clark is the Industrial Design Manager at Zebco Brands. Having worked as a design consultant for over 13 years in sporting goods, he knows his way around the industry. It’s an industry that has rapid product design and a requirement to have visuals ready quickly for use throughout the product development process and later for sales and marketing imagery. “I struggled in the past to find an affordable rendering platform that is both intuitive and had great presets to help hit the ground running,” Clark says. “We use Pro/ENGINEER for modeling at Zebco Brands where a lot of time is already put in during the day without having to then set up complicated rendering environments.”
Finding an option that was able to use their modeling data and cut down the time on render set up and creation was crucial. “After researching KeyShot online, I had the opportunity to have a demo from Garrett Paymon at the 2012 IDSA conference in Boston. I bought a license for Zebco and quickly recommended it to a few companies I consult for.”
“It’s amazing how quickly we started implementing images for catalog shots. In some cases we couldn’t get a prototype ready for catalog and used KeyShot images the next week after purchase.” While the time saved in the creation of product shots was evident, the real savings was shown when entire mock-up costs were eliminated. “We avoided incurring $4K-5K in mock-up costs in past instances. This was both at Zebco and other companies I recommended using KeyShot to. In addition to print and web visuals for final product, KeyShot has been a great tool to communicate design intent before production to internal managers, big box retailers and even the factories.”
You can find Clark McCune on Twitter @ClarkMcCuneID and view his portfolio on Coroflot.
