Ice Block Cooler
No doubt you’ve seen an ice bucket in a restaurant chilling a bottle of champagne or other fine wine. Or what about tailgating at the game and you had to bring that big, heavy cooler sloshing around with ice and your bottled or canned beverages? Michael Lester had a better idea – the Ice Block Cooler. This beautifully-crafted cooler can easily keep six bottles or cans (or a bottle of wine) cool for hours, all while being stylishly lit up by the cool built-in LEDs. And, no ice is required due to its internally-housed freezer gel – just chill the Ice Block Cooler in the freezer and it’s ready to go.
To Market… To Market…
In order to get the Ice Block Cooler in the marketplace for the holiday season, Michael enlisted the help of ICOMold. He had his design from the design house, but it didn’t look quite like the existing design. Michael Zhao, President of ICOMold explains, “Mr. Lester needed to get his product to market in time for the holiday season, so we made the injection mold tooling in three and a half weeks as opposed to the eight or nine weeks he was being quoted from other shops. The design for the cooler didn’t have the icy look it has now. We took the design and reshaped the outside in CAD to give it the chiseled ice block look.”
The LED lighting was an integrated system inside the unit that was kept isolated from the freezer gel. Once samples were made, there were issues with mechanical parts that were ironed out, but the more pressing issue was getting the right type of material to fit inside the cooler’s cavities where the drinks would go.
ICOMold was consulted when selecting the right materials to hold different sizes of containers and to keep them safe from breaking when moving the cooler from place to place.
Ultimately, a silicone material which acted as a hugging gasket was used to keep bottles or cans in place and keep them safe and cool.
The final Ice Block Cooler product is about one-half the size of an average cooler that could hold the same amount of beverages, and, of course, weighs a lot less than a huge ice chest filled with melting water. “I’m just happy that we had another satisfied customer with a beautiful product on the market.” Visit www.iceblockcooler.com to learn more about this product.
