As Ben announced in the video, our first-ever Quirky Summit is coming up this weekend right here at Quirky HQ in downtown Manhattan.
We’re flying in a handful of active users to help us reflect on the past year and plan for the next. If you’re in the New York area and want to join the conversation, well, we’d love to have you!
Just reach out to the Community Team at questions@quirky.com by Wednesday at noon, and we’ll hook you up with all the details.
You may have noticed all the order completion emails going out lately for products that will be shipping soon. We hope you’re as excited as we are during this great push for the holidays!
Here’s how it shakes down for your piggy banks:
As people confirm their presales commitments for products in which you have influence, your share of the revenue from each order begins its journey to reality. The dollars and cents due to you move from Potential Earnings and will be tracked behind the scenes while we work to fulfill orders and collect payment. For items which are not immediately shippable, you’ll have to wait patiently until they actually roll out of our warehouse doors and into happy customers’ hands. Once each order is paid for and shipped, you’ll see your Available Balance climb.
So don’t worry if you don’t see your cash money during this in-between phase. It’s all being calculated and tracked for you.
This week, we’re kicking off the development of a brand new consumer electronics product, just in time for CES 2011. We’re throwing our “under-$150-no-integrated-software” rule out the window for this one.
Let’s come together and invent something amazing to unveil at CES 2011.
We will be launching this week’s winner at the world’s best-attended consumer electronics media event, held during the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This means that the winning product will instantly enter the radar of media representatives from around the world! (The excitement is killing us too.)
The sky’s the limit here, so let’s create something truly technologically awesome. Robots, anyone?
Let’s be real — there are few things in life that are suck more than Black Friday crowds.
Why leave the house unless you really have to? Get all your holiday shopping done right in the comfort of your home (WTF-blanket and Brandy-spiked cider optional).
The Quirky store has loads of holiday specials on products shipping for the holidays. Snag a Space Bar for your techie dad, Travelstacks for your neat freak mom, a Click n Cook for your sis’s new apartment, and a Cloak for your Apple fanboy bro. There’s something for everyone, and the added bonus of sharing the awesome story of how you helped bring your gift to life.
In between gobbling up turkey, tofurky, and drool-worthy products on Quirky, let’s take time to recognize what’s really important: football family! We’re taking tomorrow off to spend some quality time with our televisions relatives. We’ll be back bright and early on Friday for you guys, our other family. Try not to miss us too much!
What we’ve been doing the last few weeks…
Once we found out Digits would be going to production, we took a second look at the product, for usability and manufacturability.
With the original design, our manufacturing partners were not confident that a safety pin the size of Digits would be strong or usable. For this reason we started to investigate changing the method of attachment. We still wanted it to pierce through the glove, so it would not fall off, so we revised the design to be more like a push pin. The final concept that the factory approved will be a push pin style pin that you push through the glove with your finger. The sharp point gets pushed to the outside where it snaps into the front part of the digit.
The other piece of the puzzle that has shifted is the materials involved. When Digits went into presale, the part that contacted the touchscreen was made of conductive thread. All of the touchscreen gloves out there used this material, and we made some prototypes in the shop with the threads and they really worked, so we were excited about it. Once we went into manufacturing, the factory had a new material they suggested to us: conductive silicone. The silicone was even better since water rolls right off it, which we thought might be helpful in the snow. To make sure the silicone worked as well as the threads, we got a sample from the factory, left it in the freezer for half the day and then tested it on our touchscreens. We found it to be just as good, if not better.
After we confirmed the new materials, our partners abroad sent us the details on how the factory would proceed. The metal parts would be made on a lathe, which is a machine that catches the material on its ends and spins it on its axis while you carve away. This is perfect for a part that is small and round, and perfect for us because we wouldn’t have to pay for new tooling, just the labor of creating the part. The factory would then take the metal part for the outside piece and overmold the conductive silicone onto it.
What we’ll be doing over the next several weeks…
While Nikki (our amazing Ops specialist) was in China last week, she got to see the first factory prototypes of Digits. (image below: only part of the surface was covered with the conductive silicone, so we could see the material behind)
She sent us this email on November 15:
Hey All,
So I tried the Digits this a.m. and I’m really impressed. This product, when it’s correct, will be awesome.
It’s not bulky at all and the function works. In fact, it’s so not bulky, that I could still text using my Blackberry keypad.
They are fully aware of all the changes that need to be made to these. We’ll see the T1 by Nov 24.
The T1‘s will have corrections already made from the protoypes Nikki tried, so hopefully there will not be much more to correct (or nothing at all!). Because of the holiday, we should be seeing T1 samples early next week.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” - William Shakespeare
Now good ol’ William Shakespeare knew a thing or two about plays, but as his musings apply to product naming… well we think he might be a tinge off. Product naming is anything but arbitrary, especially in the case of products that are meant to support and interact with existing products, like Product 66, our new closet organizer. We recently made the decision to change the name of this product from Stack Pack to Style File, and we wanted to explain why in order to share some things we consider when making name choices.
We’re designing this product to enhance one’s personal experience with their clothing. In a name like Style File, a subjective word like “style” gets the consumer thinking about their personal style, and what it may mean to file such a thing.
Stack Pack, though an excellent contender, sounds like a contained product that would be used on its own… plus, every time we say “Stack Pack” our thoughts seem to trail right off into little cups of pudding goodness, and we can’t be distracting customers from what we really want them to purchase!
Ergo, we will be renaming the closet organizer the Style File. A big shout out to our man Spencer Daly, and all participating Quirks. We’ll be launching soon, so keep an eye out!
If your under-desk cable jumble is as frightening as ours, get thee to the Quirky store and commit to a Plug Hub ASAP. And if not… well, do it for us. Plug Hub is now available for just $23.95 presale, $28.95 retail, with a threshold of 1200.
Keep your cords clean and concealed with Plug Hub, an under-desk cord management station that hides your power strip and cords in one discreet unit.
Product features:
– Three openings on the top of the unit direct your cords neatly to your power strip.
– Three integrated cord anchors let you wrap up and hide longer cords.
– Sit Plug Hub on its rubber bottom or on its back, or mount it to a wall or the bottom of a desk. Holes on the bottom of the unit also let you attach your power strip directly to the unit.
– Made from rigid plastic with a rubber “foot” on the bottom.
– Charcoal, with a light blue base.
Product dimensions:
3.5in x 10.5in x 9.5in
Hey there all you quirky boys and girls!
After a few months of helping the Quirky design team push your brilliant ideas through our crazy process, I think it’s about time I introduce myself.
I’m Adam… nice to meet you!
I have been freelancing at Quirky for a few months, but I am happy to announce, I’m here to stay. I can’t begin to tell you how exhilarating it is working at Quirky. Not only is there more energy and passion running through this office than any other, but having an enormous community with an equal amount of passion working with us is truly inspiring.
Previous to Quirky, I had been working for product design consultancies around NYC, but none of them were quite quirky enough for me. I have a passion for creating meaningful products that solve real world problems…. I’m thrilled to be working at a place that, with your help, can make that happen!!
Want to know more? I can be bribed into revealing all of my quirks with candy… or beer… or most anything delicious.
Can’t wait to work with all of you!
– Adam
Hello Everyone,
It’s great to be on board as a junior industrial designer!!! I am extremely excited to be apart of the Quirky community and to witness, first hand, the amazing things to come in the future of social product design. I was born and raised in California and spent most of my childhood in LA and then moved to the San Francisco area. Ever since I could remember, I was altering or taking apart any object I could put my hands on, from power wheels to my sister’s bike. I was lucky enough to find Industrial Design to help me release my creative juices. My education and working experience in the Silicon Valley and Paris have provided me with a diverse set of challenges in design and have only solidified my passion for creation. I have learned that the more I expose myself to different culture, art, and people, the more inspiring my world will become. I have never met such a passionate team of designers and community members and feel honored to be apart of this great challenge.
– Faris
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