Over the next 24 hours, we’ll be holding a special “design finalization” round on the Wrapster, Quirky’s new Earbud Cord Management Thingy. Log on to this link to view 3D renders of the two finalists, and cast your vote!
Know before you stow with Weigh To Go — the latest socially-developed product to hit Quirky’s online store. This snazzy travel accessory is available for a special pre-sale price of $33 ($5 off the retail price of $38), and has a threshold of 775. Snatch yours up today!
Weigh To Go is a multi-functional travel accessory whose compact form packs a digital scale, identification tag, and built-in lock to prevent theft. Tired of overweight baggage fees? With Weigh To Go, you can know before you stow!
Weigh To Go’s slim interface is made up of:
- A high gloss ABS plastic shell with a rubber bumper surrounding the exterior for protection while in transit.
- A durable steel carabiner with a built-in combination lock. The combination can be reset by the user.
- Two velcro straps that wrap around the underside of the luggage handle to secure the unit down.
- A battery-powered scale for measuring weight.
To use Weigh To Go, just press the power button and set your unit — pounds or kilograms. Reset the weight to zero by pressing the tare button, and release the velcro straps from the underside of the luggage handle, making sure the steel carabiner is secured. Grab the Weigh To Go body and pull upward, lifting the suitcase gently off the ground.
Once the luggage is lifted for about five seconds, slowly lower and rest the suitcase on the ground. The Weigh To Go handle will display a recording of the weight on its digital interface. To shut the unit off, press power button again or wait 45 seconds and it will power off automatically.
I am slowly discovering how the Quirky social product development engine works.
I wanted to share this simple graphic with you.
It explains the current product development life cycle.
I don’t know how many of you out there use Solidworks, but it’s a program that allows you to build 3D models. Sometimes it does so quickly, and that’s always good to hope for, but mostly Solidworks decides the rate at which Solidworks wants to work. Unless you want it to crash, you often have to switch to something else for a minute or two while it thinks over whether or not it’s going to do what you requested. My five favorite places to go (in no particular order):
1. http://www.quirky.com – OK, that’s a cop out, but I really do read the comments, I obsessively watch what’s close to its presale threshhold, and I’m starting to leave more comments of my own.
2. http://www.asofterworld.com/
3. http://thereifixedit.com/
4. The Onion horoscope
5. http://wondermark.com/
Sun sets at Quirky’s sparkly new HQ on Broadway in New York City.
(photo compliments of Mike Lacy)
Starting today, you’ll notice two brand spankin’ new upgrades to our system:
1. Highlighted staff comments, which will make it easier to identify staff responses to issues on the boards.
2. Pretty new notification e-mails. No more of that boring text bullcrap.
Hope you enjoy! We’re also working on getting that payment system all fixed up for you — it should be up by early next week.
Happy Monday! We kicked off the day with a staff meeting to discuss our goals for the coming week. Some highlights:
- We received a ton of sales orders over the weekend, and we’re coordinating with our warehouse to fulfill them. Translation? More money for you!
- We’re working on the log-in issues with GetSatisfaction, and we hope to have the problem fixed shortly.
- Our design team is super-committed to providing feedback on all idea submissions. Check out their comments in this week’s product evaluation.
- The next Quick & Quirky throwdown is tentatively scheduled for March 16. We want to get y’all involved in choosing the theme, so keep checking back for updates!
- Over the next several days, we hope to roll out a series of system upgrades — pretty new notification e-mails, a date stamp on ideas, and improvements to our community forum, including direct links to threads.
- IT’S MOVING WEEK! We’ll spend the first half of the week packing up shop, and we hope to be settled in our new space by Thursday.
That’s all, folks… and here’s a jam to get you pumped for the week:
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.
———————————————————————————————————————————-
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.
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback in our Community Forum on the industrial design for the “Wrapster,” the “Earbud Cord Management Thingy” submitted by Matthew Fleming. In the spirit of transparency, we’d like to give you guys some insight on how we came to our final decision on this project.
We got some great design submissions this round, and after much discussion, we narrowed the list down to two — Matthew’s original design and the Quirky “Bracelet Style” design. Neither design was perfect, and neither seemed like a fully marketable product for several reasons: size, design, functionality, etc. It was clear, that regardless of the winner, there was still a ton of work to be done in order to incorporate everyone’s feedback and design a bad-ass product.
In these cases, we try to select the design that is most like how we envision the product ending up. The form of the bracelet design was closest to the form we reckoned would wind up being used, given all the feedback that we’d collected and the competitive landscape. That said, the integration of a clip, vertical/horizontal wrapping, and even the elimination of the bracelet function were at the tops of our minds.
At the end of the day, we want to work with you to create the best product we can, which will appeal to a wide range of consumers. Put simply: we’d like to sell bajillions of stuff.
Given the conversation that’s transpired over in the Community Forum, we’d like to give both design ideas a fair shot… we’re going to a re-vote.
Over the next few days, we’ll fully complete both designs given all of the feedback that came in from the ID, research, and eval phases. We will create formal, 3D visualizations of both designs and reopen the project on Tuesday for a 24-hour revote. Submissions to this project will be closed, but comments, votes, and rating will of course be on.
We are excited to see how this plays out. We’re listening closely!
By now, you should have received your very first Quirky newsletter. We hope you like it!
If you didn’t receive the newsletter in your e-mail inbox, check it out online at this link.
If you didn’t receive the newsletter, and you’d like to, you could try a few different things:
1. Check your filter settings. If you’re using Gmail, check your “Spam” folder and mark the newsletter as “Not Spam.”
2. Add jess@quirky.com to your list of approved senders.
3. Delete some of your messages — it’s possible you’re over your disk space limit.
4. Check your Quirky user account to see if the e-mail you’re registered with is the e-mail you use now.
5. If all else fails, shoot me an e-mail at jess@quirky.com and I’ll be happy to fix the problem!