Congratulations Abdullah Al-Harbi, Julie Mennucci, and Gregg Huberty!

Abdullah Al-Harbi is an Aerospace Engineer from Saudi Arabia.  He has worked as a consulting engineer for fighter aircrafts in the past.  He has a love for kitchen gadgets and other home products that simplify people’s daily life.  Abdullah noticed his mother experiencing difficulty when ever she tried to remove green leaves of herbs from their stems by hand.  He went to work prototyping ways to help his mother with this arduous task and came up with the Herb Stripper.

The design team thought that his invention idea is an interesting new way of gathering herbs off of the stems.  They said is seems faster than using herb snips, and not all herbs are supposed to be snipped since it causes browning.  They will explore designing this product with a bowl/container for herbs to fall into.  The marketing team thought it would be a great product to expand our kitchen line with.  The team believes we already have retail channels for cooking tools.  The viability team thought that Abdullah’s prototype and patent make it a very secure endeavor for Quirky to take on.

Julie Mennucci works full-time as a real estate agent and in her spare time she designs jewelry.  She used to live in New York City and would take the subways on a daily basis.  After Julie was done drinking her coffee, she would have to inconveniently carry the container.  Her bag was never big enough to toss it in there.  She quickly realized a Collapsible Travel Mug, would be a great solution to her problem.

The design team thought that this was a novel idea for the market.  They think a big issue to overcome would be to make sure that consumers didn’t have the perception that the product would leak.  They think it will be challenging to make it collapsible, leakproof, and insulated.  The marketing team loved the product idea and thought that if designed properly would be easy to merchandise and would have universal consumer appeal. People would use this product on a daily basis.  The viability team said that since this product would be collapsible it would be easy to ship.

Gregg Huberty is an engineer from Illinois and this is his fourth invention idea to be picked by Quirky.  After one of his glasses broke when it was washed in the dishwasher, he started brainstorming ways that he could prevent that from happening again.  That is how he came up with a Holder for Drinking Glasses.  The idea of it is to keep glasses stationary while in the dishwasher.

After much discussion, Quirky decided it would be beneficial to move forward with this idea.  Because the retail response from Tether has been so positive, this could be an interesting product line development.  Tether’s product manager said that even in the best dishwashers, nice glasses tend to get knocked over.  This causes people to hand-wash some of their nicer glasses.  The Holder for Drinking Glasses idea could encourage people to put these glasses in the dishwasher.