Major-appliance and white-goods manufacturers — refrigeration, laundry, dishwashing, cooking and air-conditioning OEMs and tier-1 suppliers, $100M to $40B in revenue, running the lines where margin is actually decided.
The 2026 design-partner cohort
Design-partner programme, 2026. Duromex is pre-launch — partner identities are withheld under NDA and shown by segment, not by logo.
One buys, two champion, and several approve. Duromex is built so each gets what they actually need.
Owns first-pass yield, throughput, warranty and cost. Wants autonomous, higher-yield production without depending on high-turnover labour.
Owns forming, foaming and assembly recipes and product quality on the line. Lives with every changeover and every rework loop.
Owns product quality under IEC 60335, leak, functional and energy test acceptance, and warranty, reliability and traceability.
First-pass yield came in below target again. Nobody can say which station caused it, so the meeting becomes an argument between forming, foaming and test.
Units that failed functional test are queued. Each one absorbed every minute of value the line added before it failed.
A model change means re-tuning forming, foaming and assembly by hand. The ramp-up scrap is budgeted for, which is its own indictment.
A field-failure pattern from six months ago traces back to a wiring step nobody photographed at the time.
The same shift, with every unit perceived, every failure attributed upstream, every changeover rehearsed in the twin and every action logged.
Duromex qualifies hard by segment because the wedge workflow changes completely between them.
Cabinets are formed, foamed and charged — then judged by a leak test and an energy rating. Duromex links the foam shot and the seam to the number the tester prints.
Drums, cabinets and wiring harnesses at high volume. Balance, seal and electrical integrity decide whether a machine survives its warranty period.
Tub forming, insulation, pump and heater assembly, then a wet functional test that is expensive to repeat.
Enamel is the product. Coverage, film build, cure and chipping decide whether a range ships as first quality or a downgrade.
Brazed joints, refrigerant charge and performance test under tightening F-gas rules — a leak here is a compliance event, not just a rework.
We would rather disqualify in week one than run a pilot that was never going to produce a clean result.
| Criterion | What we look for |
|---|---|
| Volume | Sufficient production volume to drive clear ROI on one line |
| Access | Forming, paint, foaming, leak-test, assembly and MES systems with API or OPC access for integration |
| Mandate | An executive mandate to lift first-pass yield or cut warranty, scrap and rework |
| Commitment | Willingness to run a paid pilot with a defined first-pass-yield, warranty or scrap success metric |
| Owner | A named champion on the line who will use the review console |
| Security | A willingness to integrate under documented security controls |
Saying this out loud saves everyone a quarter.
Tiny appliance assemblers or rebranders with negligible in-house manufacturing have nothing for the loop to close.
If forming, test and assembly systems cannot be integrated under security controls, there is no product here.
Buyers looking for a generic horizontal analytics dashboard rather than a system of action will be disappointed by us.
“Our end-of-line functional testers told us what failed. They never told us which press stroke or foam shot caused it. That link is the whole product.”
“Foam voids are invisible until the energy rating comes back wrong. Predicting density distribution before the cabinet cures is the part I could not buy anywhere else.”
“If it writes to the press, it needs an audit trail a quality auditor accepts. Duromex started there instead of bolting it on.”
The products differ. The sequence does not. That is why a defect pattern learned on a refrigeration cabinet in one plant can help a laundry line in another — without either one sharing a recipe.
Appliance manufacturing is a small world. Measurable wins become inbound.
design partners in cohort one
buying-committee personas
pain points we price against
written success metric per pilot
Three to five partners, instrumented on the wedge workflow, with commercial terms that reflect the risk they are taking on a pre-launch company.
We instrument the wedge workflow and measure the baseline for first-pass yield, warranty or scrap. Nothing is written.
The agent recommends and predicts; your engineer approves. Accuracy and ROI are proven against the published baseline.
Low-risk lines and test workflows run under adaptive control with automatic defect and leak triage.
Adjacent modules in the same factory, and a flagship case study that both sides are proud to publish.
Possibly not yet, unless your volume on one line is unusually high. The ROI has to clear the price on a single metric, and that is a volume question more than a revenue one.
Design partners are under NDA during the programme. As case studies publish, references become available — and reference calls are part of the terms we trade discounts for.
A named champion — usually the process or quality engineer who owns the line — plus an executive sponsor who owns the metric.
Bring the number. We will bring the shadow-mode instrumentation.
Duromex is pre-launch. Figures shown are design-partner targets and modelled economics, not audited results. Ask us for the methodology.