From product to platform.
control yourself//
The ask was economy.
The work created leverage.
One housing.
Seven products.
Three brands.
Market durability
Still in market across brands and variants.
Platform leverage
One housing. Seven products. Three brands.
(the condition)
Eutech Instruments made reliable, low-cost field testers for water analysis across pH, conductivity, TDS, and salinity.
The testers worked. The line needed to scale more affordably.
The brief: design a pocket tester to complement the existing pen-style stick testers. Use the existing component architecture: PC board, three buttons, segmented display, probe, battery housing. Build it for less than the economy tester already in production.
The new design had to differentiate seven variants, stand on a retail shelf, and hang from a peg display.
I was consulting in-house at Thermo Fisher Scientific, working directly with Eutech's development team alongside Paul Sydlowski and Craig Henshaw, whose mechanical engineering fluency made the concept buildable.
(the diagnosis)
The cost target ruled out structural variation.
Seven products could not mean seven housings.
The variation had to live somewhere else:
in the membrane graphics,
the PC board configuration,
the color of the plastic.
The form had to stayed constant.
Everything that distinguished one tester from another was applied to it.
The constraint became the architecture.
Then, a second insight, not specified in the brief: a bad reading can be checked, a dead battery can be replaced. A tester dropped to the bottom of a wastewater tank is gone. It's a lost tester.
Designing for retrieval is designing against the one failure a user cannot undo.
(the work)
Platform architecture.
One injection-molded, ergonomic form carried seven products. Variation lived in membrane graphics and PC board configuration.
Field-use system.
A sealed mono-body housing met IP67 requirements and floated, making retrieval part of the architecture. Tactile controls, an upright display, a calibration cap, tool-free battery access and non-volatile memory made the same form practical across field and lab use.
Channel and brand flexibility.
One clamshell package served both scientific supply and point-of-purchase retail. The same housing carried Eutech EcoTestr, Cole-Parmer's Oakton line, and Thermo Fisher Scientific's Pocket Tester, differentiated through membrane graphics and plastic color rather than form.
Product identity.
ECO started as shorthand for economy. The development work opened another frame: waterproofing, retrieval, fewer parts, and field durability moved ECO from economy toward ecology.
I pushed the visible system with it: from neutral beige toward green, with a leaf mark, and supporting graphics.
EcoTestr moved from a cost label to an environmental signal.
(the proof)
Reception was strong enough that Eutech's Head of Product made the call mid-development: replace the existing product line with this design.
The architecture scaled across seven Eutech EcoTestrs and adapted for Cole-Parmer's Oakton line and Thermo Fisher Scientific Pocket Testers.
One housing.
Seven products.
Three brands.
More than fifteen years in the market.
Thermo Fisher has since introduced updated Pocket Tester variants with a refined body and LCD display.
The core architecture remains recognizable: elongated handheld form, upright display, button zone, removable cap, field-ready use.
EcoTestr became the visible expression of the system.
Green colorway.
Leaf motif.
Waterproof body.
Field-ready form.
Underneath it: one-handed use, a sealed body, a workflow proven in the field and the lab, and one housing that carried the product family across three brands without new primary housing tooling.
The work became a visual and structural language built to travel beyond a single product.
The brief asked for economy.
The work created leverage.
The products changed.
The architecture held.
(the evidence)
