Luge Cubes was Quirky Product #10. It was submitted in July 2009 – basically, the Stone Age in Quirky time. We’ve since reconsidered if 300 units is really a reasonable threshold for this product. It has been sitting in the Quirky store for more than 500 days and is (let’s be honest) a little off-brand for Quirky at this point. Encouraging unsafe drinking habits is not something we really want to be doing as we go Back to College with our Community.

As you know, our end goal is to make the best decisions for our company and our community by only bringing to market the best products that are feasible, profitable, and in line with our brand. Thanks for your support!

Splash Stacks has been an interesting sourcing project. Of course, there are no factories that make foldable bath mats for bathing children [ ] so we began sourcing factories that make products with similar materials and processes. This led us to plenty of sporting goods factories, as well as factories that make swimming equipment. After all, the materials needed for surfboards, kickboards, and Splash Stacks are quite similar!

We asked one factory we liked to make a handmade sample prototype for us. Check out the images below. Although the quality is not anywhere near where it will be for the production units, these samples make us confident that this factory is capable of the project.

Over the next month…

We have selected this factory and the tooling process is underway. We are actually taking an extra tooling step for Splash Stacks: we are making a wooden tool first. The wooden tool will yield near-production quality samples, but only about 20 units. We will use these units to validate the size, best materials, and surface texture for all the necessary parts.

After we test the functionality of these units and make any necessary modifications, we will move straight to the production tool. The wooden tool adds a step into the process upfront, but will shorten our time between the T1 and TFinal production tool and ensure we knock this one out of the park! We look forward to receiving and testing the wooden tooled units on December 17 and kicking off the production tool shortly after that.

Note: Starting this week, we’ll be changing up the format of Production Reports, switching from text-based to video. We just filmed a big group… look for them in the coming week!

Over the past few months…

Since late September, our sourcing teams in both China and the U.S. have been gathering information on potential factories for UnHampered.

The sheer size of this product limits the potential factories… but it’s also what makes the sourcing process exciting! While plastics factories are quite common, plastics factories that have injection molding machines that can product laundry-bin size parts are far less common.

That said, we have locked in a few viable partners in China. One of our factories made a functional prototype for us. See images!

As always, we are doing our best to keep unit costs down. UnHampered, as designed, is quite a lot of material. We have gone through some slight design modifications to reduce the material in some places without detracting from the original design intent.

In the next several weeks…

We have secured factories overseas that can handle the large scale injection molding needed to complete this product. Now, we just have to negotiate pricing and delivery timeline. We are also waiting on one final quote from a U.S. supplier. They do single shot injections on a 2000-ton machine — these things are awesomely huge! We will make a decision on which supplier to go with and push UnHampered into tooling very soon.

Oh, MugStir. It’s turned out to be quite the adventure bringing you to market! Here’s what’s going on now.

After lots of thought, and endless negotiations, we’ve decided to switch factories. The old factory did not prove capable in meeting our quality standards.

As Gaz wrote several weeks ago, we went through T1, T2, T3, and T4 samples with this factory. When the next sample still failed to have all of our requested modifications, we realized that they could not meet our needs.

Truth is, we could have shipped it “as is”, but we didn’t feel that would be the best decision for our customers, our company, and the hundreds of community members who influenced this product. We know higher quality could be achieved, and so we abandoned our tool at the first factory. We feel that it’s worth the longer wait and added expense to retool MugStir someplace else.

What’s coming up next…

The factory we’ve chosen to be MugStir’s new home is also the factory that is making Travelstacks. They’ve already proven their stellar quality and speedy turnaround time. Tooling is far underway.

We have discussed tolerances with the factory engineers to ensure that the spoon will stay in place when you raise your mug to your mouth for a drink. This factory is great at co-molding as well, and will be using this process for MugStir. The silicone will be co-molded to the metal part of the spoon. This is just one of the many improvements over the old molding process at the first factory.

In switching factories, we have also switched this product’s colors. We will now be making purple, blue and magenta MugStirs (bye bye mocha) and they’ll still be sold in sets of three (one of each color). We are happy with this switch in colors, as it allows us to stay more in line with the new Quirky look and brand.

We’re scheduled to see a T1 sample on December 17. While we’re frustrated about having to start over, we’re confident that we’ve made the right decision and are happy to have a number of very high quality factory relationships in place. Thanks for bearing with us!

Since you can cancel your pre-sale commitment at any time, we want to be sure that products that are hitting threshold do so for good reason. If everyone committed and then backed out before shipping, that would defeat the purpose of the pre-sales threshold, right?

So moving forward, the quirky.com check out process will not allow any single community member to order more then 25 units, to help prevent this kind of thing. If any community member, or retailer, or wholesaler wants to commit to more than 25 units, they are welcome to reach out to me at nikki@quirky.com.

Don’t worry; I don’t bite! I will work with you to process your bulk order as quickly as possible. There will be a deposit and purchase order necessary, but don’t worry, it does not take long and it is not hard. Just email me if you’re interested! And as always, feel free to hit us up with any questions you have. We’re happy to respond.

Our warehouse says “Bring on the Cloaks….we’re ready!”

We’ve alerted our warehouse to the volume of orders that will need to be shipped out in a very short amount of time. They have done all the prep work they can to get these out effectively and efficiently and have added extra staff members for the Cloak shipping days.

The Cloak is coming!

And to echo what Mike said before, I could not feel more lucky to be part of such an amazing company. It is truly unbelievable to think that a year ago it was literally 3 of us sitting in a room trying to make it all happen. And well, I think we have all proved that it is more than “happening” now. I feel the office is humming with excitement, buzz, movement, energy, enthusiasm and knowledge. And of course rock star products, people and smelly melting plastic from Bertha.

I continue to be thankful for the opportunity to grow and develop with this company. I started out in sales (for Kluster), then switched to PR, then to copy writing, then to customer service, community ambassador, and I am settled here (for the time being) in Operations with a side dish of Domestic Sales.

So while you Quirks are thankful that we have created a place for your innovation and invention ideas to come true, I am thankful for a work environment where I continually learn and feel challenged each and every day. (Sorry if that got slightly corny, Quirks.) It is the truth.

I will admit – I remain perpetually cold in the office. At Avenue A it was because of our faulty heater, and here, well we have to thank Bertha for needing so much AC so she does not overheat. (well, or maybe, it is just me!)

But if the AC is my only issue here at Quirky, well then, I think I have it pretty good.

Looking forward to our upcoming year/s ahead. Thanks once again to Ben, the entire Quirky Team, community and investors.

P.S. For those interested, I was able to purchase a $3 pashmina in Soho… you can really bargain for scarves when it is 85 degrees outside in NYC!

As you probably know, I am not a designer or engineer, operations is more my jam, but throughout my experience working at Quirky and being surrounded by so many awesome products that we make ourselves, it is quite inspiring to see what the MoMa sells.

Here are some of my favorite MoMa products that I use daily:

Muji Calculator – it’s beautiful and functional!

Daily Cereal Bowl – high rim keeps me from spilling milk on my computer! (yes, that happened before I started eating out of this bowl)

Nesting Bowls – Awesome cooking bowls and cups. They store compactly inside one another!

I won’t bore you by showing you my entire MoMa collection but I will mention that every time I walk around the store, aside from being tempted to buy more, I wonder when (not if) one of Quirky’s products will hit the shelves at MoMa.

We KNOW we will get there.

So Quirks, do you think our MoMa-worthy product has already been made, or is it yet to come?

Well both, really. That is a hammer in the wall. And we are REALLY EXCITED.

You see, we will be rigging a 2000 pound 3D printer up to our 3rd floor model shop in the coming days. This means that one of the current walls will be coming down in order to make room for the delivery. (Yes, we will put the wall back up after the printer is safely installed). But for now, why not stick a hammer into the wall!? You know all those times you wished you could just throw something at the wall? Well for today and tomorrow, we are exercising that option…

Who’s excited for our 2000 pound robot?! We know we are!

As some of you have noticed, there is sometimes a short lag time between when one project ends and the next one is launched. We know you are curious as to why this might be so I figured it was time to share some insight.

I can assure you it’s not because we are out to lunch or taking coffee breaks (unfortunately we don’t really take many of those while at the HQ) but it is simply because we are reviewing/discussing ALL the submissions and community votes/comments to ensure we make the best decision for each and every project.

Please bear with us if you see these slight delays. We promise that we’ll be selecting the winner(s) as soon as we can.

Also, one thing we will work toward doing in the future (and you can see that we have started it for the Gym Carry naming project) is updating you with a current design brief after the ID phase is over.

In other words, after the ID phase has ended and winner(s) are selected, we will do our best to add descriptive briefs to the project desciption boxes when projects launch. We will include info like:

– Here is what we currently know about the industrial design of this product.

– Here is what we are still investigating about the industrial design of this product.

– And here is what we need from you all in the mean time.

Often the “here is what we need” will be your brilliant naming suggestions, but in some cases it might be a different project, maybe ID round 2, maybe product research round 2, etc.

Bottom lines:

1. Trust that we are working to move projects along as fast as we can – there is a lot that goes into every decision.

2. We will do our very best to inform the community of our current “design briefs” so that you can use this info when submitting your names/taglines/logos.

We think this will work to help you all in your submissions and in turn help our products be even more awesome.

As always, hit us up with questions about any of this and we will continue to do our best to move projects along as speedily as possible!

On an unrelated note, how sad? Double scoop of gelato slid right off my cone last night after lick 1.