Artic Air Ice Jet X3
A redesign of a dated evaporative cooler into a more premium, performance-led retail product with a clearer visual identity and stronger product story.
ROLE
Lead Industrial Designer
TIMELINE
August 2024 - November 2024
SCOPE
Form, CAD, CMF, tank prototyping, production handoff
RESULTS
Launched for the 2025 retail season
The old Ice Jet was too round and glossy, it looked interchangeable with a dozen generic competitors, and it was stuck at 3.0 stars. On top of that, cheaper knockoffs were copying our forms directly. So this was never really a refresh. My job was to defend the line and reposition it and give it a design language distinctive enough that copies would obviously look like copies, make it feel like it belonged next to higher-end brands and fix the one thing the whole category got wrong: keeping ice cold long enough to actually cool a room.
The Ice Jet line had a problem you could see on the shelf and read in the reviews. It looked dated, knockoffs were copying our old forms, and like most coolers under $40, the ice melted too fast. This was a ground-up redesign to fix all three — and it ended up pulling a six-figure unit reorder across multiple retail channels.
01 / CHALLENGE
I started wide, more than twenty quick thumbnail sketches, looking for a form that actually belonged to Arctic Air instead of the category. The circular fan face came out of that early and stuck. It's distinctive, it photographs well, and it reads from across an aisle, which matters when someone is deciding in a few seconds on shelf.
At the same time I was solving the real problem: keeping the ice frozen. I prototyped a few tank configurations and landed on a double-wall insulated tank. The same idea as a vacuum water bottle, built into a removable reservoir. I tested different volumes to hit an eight-hour target without making the base too big or too heavy to sit on a counter.
The old line used glossy plastic and a dated blue gradient, so for CMF I moved it to a matte white body with a subtle linear texture — the kind of finish you see on premium small appliances and added a blue LED ring around the fan face. The ring does a couple of things at once: it puts the brand color right where your eye already goes, and it works as a night light, which stretches the product from daytime cooling into the bedroom.
Then I took it to production myself. Final SolidWorks, CMF specs, and documentation went to the OEM, and I worked through the tolerances, mold review, and finish callouts so the matte texture and the LED ring actually survived injection molding
02 / WHAT DID I DO
The redesign pulled a six-figure unit reorder — an eight-figure retail value — as different channels placed orders on the new design. Then the sell-through backed it up: it's live on Amazon at $28.99, moving 800+ units a month at 3.9 stars across 314 reviews, up from the 3.0-star product it replaced. The circular face, the matte CMF, and the LED ring became the design language the rest of the Ice Jet line is now built on.
The tank is the part I'm proudest of, because it's the clearest example of how I like to work — an engineering decision that also became the product's main selling point. Designing for the under-$40 shelf isn't about adding more. It's about making a few decisions each do more than one job.
03 / THE OUTCOME
