Here’s why we won’t be at South by Southwest this year:
1. We make real products, not virtual ones.
2. Half our staff is on their way to production facilities all over the world to oversee the finalization of 5 new products coming off the line.
3. We design one brand new consumer product every week.
4. We intend to spend our travel budget selling your products to retailers worldwide rather then frolicking with internet friends.
5. It’s in Texas. (Just kidding… sort of)
Sun sets at Quirky’s sparkly new HQ on Broadway in New York City.
(photo compliments of Mike Lacy)
Thank you all for your influx of comments and participation over the past few days. We appreciate constructive criticism and high expectations from community members.
Taking some of the feedback that has been piping in on our support site, the forum, and emails to our community ambassadors, we are happy to announce the following changes to the design/influence process which will be put in effect beginning Monday:
1. At least half of the Quirky design staff will provide highlighted comments to each of the top 10 designs in each project. These are the designs that are considered serious candidates and that go through the full vetting process.
To date, the vetting process has consisted of looking at the top 10 highly voted concepts for each project in a live internal discussion about a few main factors:
- Feasibility
- Marketability / Competitive Landscape
- Potential IP issues
- Overall (cool factor, value-add, size of opportunity)
Instead of doing this in a vacuum, I have now encouraged each design team member to voice his or her expert opinion on all four of these factors as an individual comment on each of the top ideas under consideration.
This will allow community members the chance to understand and/or refute our findings prior to the end of a project/a winner being chosen.
2. Jess will chronicle/produce a video each week called ‘The Quirky Roundup’. The video will capture internal discussions that occurred in the past week (platform/tech, business, product development, and manufacturing/ops).
The idea behind this is to invite you all in to the day-to-day here at Quirky with the hopes that there is better understanding for the global/business impact of each product design opinion.
3. In December of last year, we completed a 12 month plan which included our growth plans, feature additions, product sales expectations, etc.
I am working on getting approval from our investors to make this information public. This will allow all members to share/comment on the global vision for the brand, which will help in understanding of why certain decisions are made. Hopefully this will allow us all to think more globally about this business together.
4. Re-Votes
One thing that I have encouraged the team to do from now on is not be shy of a re-vote. If we ever feel unsure of something, we should put it back up and add more time to the clock. It’s in everyone’s best interest to be on the same page and be excited about a project rather then it being a one way discussion.
5. Open lines of communication:
I want to re-iterate the fact that we are striving to provide members easy access to our team. Whether it be the community form, Twitter, the support site, emailing a community ambassador, or calling us up on the telephone (yup, we’ve got those too). Are there other forms of communication we should be using and aren’t? Let us know.
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With all of the above said, I encourage all of you as members to understand the fact that we are doing our absolute best to keep you guys as involved as possible. As always, if there is more we can be doing… say so.
Here’s a shot from yesterday on Avenue A:
Meanwhile, across town on Broadway (between Bleeker & Houston) our friends Peter and Carlos are finishing up construction on Quirky’s new HQ & Lab (forgive the blurry cell phone pictures).
Our new space is 5x the size of what we have now, and will have a fully functional Model & Prototype Shop, Conference Rooms, as well as plenty of Design & Community Support / Sales Space.
We’re excited to be growing up a bit, and look forward to showing you the new space once it’s all set up. We plan on moving the second half of next week.
No, this is not subliminal Princeton University Ad, published by Jess or Nikki…. this is the limiting factor to product shipments in the next 3 weeks.
Today marked the start of the chinese new year. With that, Quirky and all of our Chinese Partners wanted to say “Gong Xi Fa Cai”, which translates roughly into… “May prosperity be with you”
As you know, we’re waiting on Scratch & Scroll, Beamer & Cordies (and recently bobble brush) to be finished up at our factories. All 3 are VERY close, and we hope to get them all out in March, as soon as our factory returns back to work.
Chinese new year has historically been a loss of time for consumer product brands and all companies that work out there. This is like their December. Lots of workers heading home to visit their families, etc.
We are lucky to have great manufacturing partnerships in place, and I am excited about the pace and quality we have been able to keep up. Rest assured, as soon as our partners return from holiday, we’ll have the next few products shipping within a few weeks.
Next week I am going to chronicle some of the challenges we’ve had to overcome with the production of things like scratch & scroll, and beamer. These have been challenging engineering projects, but we are happy to report the wait is almost over.
….If only Tony the Tiger wasn’t holding up production for a few weeks 
GONG Xi Fa CAI everyone!
Today, I woke up where tech startups are “supposed” to be HQ’d. We’ll see about that.
Outside of pretty frequent visits to the Apple Mothership in Cupertino, I’ve spent very little time meeting with start-ups out here.
Let it be known, I love New York (hence the B.I.G.), and I think it provides an amazingly perfect environment for quirky. I’m excited to see us grow in a place where design, business, and media all converge. It’s the concrete jungle where dreams are made of, after all.
As for the schedule… today and tomorrow, Mitch and I have action-packed days of meetings with all types of people… investors, partners, and friends. I’m excited to see what the business/start-up culture is like out here first hand. I’ve just heard the myths/legends.
If I had to guess, I’d bet everything is pretty much the same, besides the bagels.
Tuesday night, I’m heading down to Long Beach to meet up with Mike Lacy & Jason Port for a mind blowing second half of the week. We’ll be attending the TED conference, rubbing elbows with people with much larger brains and trophy closets.
Look for more from me during TED. I look forward to sharing some of the inspiration that gets sprung upon us with you.
Ben Here.
So after along day hopping around the city from meeting to meeting, I blearily make my way to LaGuardia airport and board a quick flight to Boston for a morning meeting.
Got on the plane, waiting to take off… and start flipping through the pages of the Delta Inflight Magazine, called SKY.
About half way through I start reading an article about this really cool website. And then I realized it was about quirky. I then smiled evily, reached for my MacBook Pro and decided to pay 10 dollars for internet access from the sky to share my fantastic story. End Scene.
Boom, I’m outta here. Keep making cool stuff, people.
So far we’re at 3. Between them over 45 years of web development experience. The race continues. Internet Explorer… be warned: we will win. It’s just a matter of how much time you’re going to waste us in the process.
3:20 PM: New site pushed live. The site will be on/off for the next 2 hours or so as we migrate all the data over and add all the new content into our wonderful new sections. Standby here for updates. Data on the site not yet accurate. (presale/payment info)
5:54 PM: Most site interactions stable. All data migrated. Cleaning up payouts / and adding financial over the next few days. Enjoy, guys. We’d love your feedback. http://support.quirky.com is your new support forum!
