Client
EDJY
Category
Personal care, grooming tools
Year
2025
Scope
Industrial design, form development, CMF
Channel
Retail & DTC
Constraint
Most people cut their toenails with fingernail clippers, and toes aren't shaped like fingers.
The problem was an ergonomic toenail cutter built around that difference, using EDJY's own blade technology to make the experience better rather than just larger.
Decision
The cutting action was left alone. A clipper gets squeezed the way a clipper has always been squeezed, and there was no reason to make anyone relearn it.
What changed is proportion. The body is wider for two reasons that point the same way: a toenail is wider than a fingernail and needs more edge behind it, and a wider body gives the hand and thumb more to hold onto. The matte surface follows from the same place, because a hand that slips is a hand that loses the cut.
The other half is the position. Cutting your own toenails is a reaching problem before it is a cutting problem, bent over with the foot turned and the edge hard to see. The nail and the reach together set the outside of the tool, and the mechanism was fitted into what was left, which is the reverse of how a cutter normally gets built.
The width is not free. It makes a larger object than EDJY's fingernail cutter, and it made the travel case harder to resolve, because a case has to take the wider body without turning into something nobody packs. That is the trade the tool is built on: sized for the nail it is actually for, rather than sized to disappear.
Finish
60+ HRC martensitic stainless tool steel blades, glass-reinforced nylon resin body, wide matte enclosure.
More work
