Posts Tagged ‘community’

  • Tue, Oct 19 2010

    … and that’s just a tiny section of the Quirky Community Happiness Wall.

    Wanna be a part of it? You’re in luck. We’re adding to our team!


    Community Ambassador

    We’re not looking to create a “Hello, my name is Mary, this call will be monitored and recorded” kind of service culture.

    We’re looking for candor and conversation, with a healthy dose of audaciousness.

    We believe that our community (which includes inventors, customers, and creative folk) deserves to be treated as partners. We’re in this together.

    Don’t worry; it’s fine if your name is Mary… as long as you’re a Mary who possesses that intangible ability to understand and react to what people want and need without them even asking for it. A Mary who can coordinate and manage like none other, and who cares immensely about people, and more importantly the community which she (or he) is serving.

    A little about us (if ya didn’t already know):

    Quirky is a consumer product company. But, as our moniker suggests, we do things a little differently. We design and launch two new products each week. We do this with the help of a worldwide community of inventors and creatives who help us out via this little thing called the Internet.

    Quirky’s success is very much in the hands of our community. Our community is uniquely positioned as the main source of our ideas for new products, our marketing, our direct sales efforts, and our sanity (ahem).

    You’ll be communicating with people who come to Quirky for many different reasons:

    - To our inventors and prospective inventors: Welcome and walk inventors through the Quirky process. Convince them that we’re the right partners for bringing their product ideas to life.

    - To our influencers: Help community members navigate Quirky’s unique product development process. First-time user needs help because he doesn’t know how to submit his great product name idea… for 2 hours… on the phone? On it.

    - To our customers/shoppers: We want to deliver the world’s best customer service and believe that great service can easily turn a customer into an inventor and community member. Make ‘em happy.

    - To the Quirky team: lead an ongoing back-and-forth conversation between our employees and our community.

    Our ideal superstar would have:

    - EXCELLENT writing and speaking ability.

    - Ability to organize and respond to a high volume of emails and phone calls.

    - Confident, convincing, and contagious personality.

    - Flexibility with working hours.

    - Desire and ability to wear many hats and throw down when necessary… remember, we’re a start-up!

    To apply, first check out our website at www.quirky.com. Sign up, poke around, participate. After you’ve done this, send your resume and a quirky, personalized cover letter to communityjob@quirky.com. Oh, and if you have a blog or Twitter account, send us a link to that too. No recruiters or third-party applications, please.

  • Mon, Oct 11 2010

    Happy Monday! Our latest Quirk of the Week, Michael Cavada (pictured here with his lovely wife Clare), joined our awesome community last fall and we just can’t help falling for him. In addition to being ideator of The Space Bar, Mike has influenced fifty products in every stage of development, from eval to industrial design to logo design and beyond. That’s a heck of a lot of products, but it doesn’t stop there. Mike has enthusiastically shared the Quirky process with fellow teachers who were then inspired to create a curriculum to teach kids how to create product designs and develop them into actual products. He’s helping to shape the next generation of Quirklings!

    Mike shares the story of his father, who lost an arm during WWII. “Growing up as a child, I really took his handicap for granted. One day as a teen, while trying to complete a task in his presence, I got frustrated and gave up. He stepped up and said, I’ll do it, and he did just that. Wow! Since then I knew, I could do anything, if I just kept trying.”

    Wow, indeed. Learning lessons from the past and helping to shape the future, our Mike Cavada is a man for all times!

  • Fri, Oct 8 2010

    Rock With Ruthea

    By ruthea at 4:47 pm

    Hey Quirksters! I am Quirky’s new Community Intern. I am so psyched to be here and I’m really excited to learn all about Quirky’s inner workings from customer service to media to, well, the whole product development process.

    I’m interested in languages, marketing, business, technology, and physics. I enjoy skiing, long distance running and cycling, anything adventurous, good coffee, and large jewelry. Indie rock, electronic, hip-hop, and remixes and mashes of all of them take up the majority of the space on my little red iPod (I consider it my best friend, seeing as it is always with me)! I almost never have days when I don’t smile… I really dislike those rare, rare occasions.


    Name: Ruthea Noteware

    School: NYU in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Class of 2014

    Hometown: Tricky question, I was born in center city Philadelphia, grew up in Houston, TX, and went to high school in Bozeman, MT.

    What makes me quirky? I love peanuts and/or cashews with honey atop vanilla ice cream. I have a slight obsession with owls (mostly because I think they’re wise and they make very cool jewelry pendants). Thrift store exploration is a seasonal affair for me, and I write in cursive.

  • Mon, Oct 4 2010

    Boy, oh Boyd, guess who’s our latest Quirk of the Week? None other than active community member and all-around great guy, Boyd Palmer! From idea eval to ID to logo design, he gets involved at every stage of development by voting, rating and, of course, submitting ideas.

    “Quirky is great exercise for the brain and I really enjoy participating in the various stages of the product development process. Over the past couple years, I have been learning as much as I can about the product development and licensing. Like most Ideators, I would love to see one of my own ideas on a store shelf someday.”

    Put your palms together to applaud Boyd for his awesome ‘tude!

  • Mon, Sep 27 2010

    Our newest Quirk of the Week is actually one of our oldest members! Matthew Smith joined the community last year when Quirky was just a lil quirkling. It’s something he’s used to, having been an early adopter of mp3 players (he has one that holds 32 MBs) and streaming video (he was one of the first 100 users of Hulu). In his time with us, Matthew has influenced more than half of all the products that Quirky’s worked on and has offered up a number of ideas for evaluation. He is a familiar figure on the forum who constantly seeks to learn from all the info and opinions he encounters there.

    Matthew is involved with Quirky for all of the reasons that we love what we do here. “I am fascinated by the entire cycle of product design and hope that with the right idea – I may see one of my ideas fashioned into a useful, sustainable product one day.”

    From spending his time researching the latest innovations to cycling everyday between work and home to spending time with his newlywed and their own adorable quirkling, Lily, this Idaho man is clearly no couch potato!

  • Mon, Sep 20 2010

    Know any cool New York college students or recent grads? Shirley and I are looking for a lil’ help on Quirky’s community team.

    Community Internship @ Quirky Inc.

    Do you love suits? Are you familiar with the intricate complexities of Xerox machines? Have you set records with the speed at which you can ramble off Starbucks orders?

    Awesome. This internship probably isn’t for you, though.

    Quirky is seeking hard-working, ass-kicking interns to join our energetic start-up team in our New York office. There will be no coffee runs, and we don’t even have a Xerox machine. Quirky interns will assist the Community department with, well, pretty much everything. This internship will introduce you to the world of social product development and provide hands-on experience in the fields of consumer products, online community management, social media, and marketing. Please note that this internship is unpaid, but we will provide a small monthly stipend.

    Here’s what we’re looking for:
    Current college students and recent college grads
    Excellent writing and speaking ability
    Efficient and speedy work ethic
    Kind and helpful personality
    Ability and desire to throw down when necessary — remember, we are a start-up, so it’s often necessary to wear many hats!
    A cover letter that will knock our socks off
    Commitment and availability from rightthisinstant thru the end of December

    And here’s a little bit more about us:
    Quirky is a social product development company based in New York City. Your product ideas come in, the Quirky community and team work on them, we sell the product worldwide, and then we share the revenue with the inventor and all influencers. By enabling this fluid conversation between our global community of influencers and Quirky’s expert product design team, we are able to accomplish what was once unthinkable: bringing one brand new product concept from sketch to store each week.

    To apply, first check out our website at www.quirky.com. Sign up, poke around, participate. After you’ve done this, please send your resume and a quirky, personalized cover letter to communityintern@quirky.com.

  • Fri, Sep 17 2010

    Summer may be over, but Daniel Schier’s sunny attitude keeps the Quirky-verse warm and happy! Since joining the Quirky community in June, Daniel has jumped into all phases of development with submissions, votes, and suggestions. He also offers constructive and thoughtful opinions throughout the forum, helping to keep conversations productive. His enthusiasm shows in the wide array of products on which he’s earned influence, from Bonfi to Waffler to the newly launched Trek Support. Maybe it’s Daniel’s animation experience showing through, but he sure “draws” the best out in all of us!

  • Wed, Sep 15 2010

    Recently Stephen Markas snagged the “Quirk of the Week” crown for being Quirky’s highest social seller. Like a true champ, he immediately reached out to us about sharing his secrets for success with the Quirky community.

    When not racking up the referrals, Stephen runs the popular iPad blog iPad Accessories and is a professional marketer and marketing consultant. He’s also a recovering artist, amateur rock climber, and self styled globe trotting hippie.

    Try out his affiliate marketing tips below, and you could be raking in the referral dough too! And don’t forget to give him props for this great guest post.

    As a professional marketer one of the most attractive things about Quirky to me is the potential to make money as an affiliate through their social sales feature. Affiliate marketing can be a great thing — you don’t have a great idea for a product, you don’t have to ship anything, you don’t even have to invest a single cent to make money! All you have to invest is your time. However, time is a commodity many of us are very short on these days. If you are trying make it as an affiliate marketer, how you spend your time is going to mean the difference between success and failure.

    There is an Islamic story about a giant ship engine that failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a youngster. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

    Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed! A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

    “What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!”

    So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

    The man sent a bill that read:

    Tapping with a hammer: $2.00

    Knowing where to tap: $9998.00

    Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort in your life makes all the difference. Now, that proverb is applicable in so many aspects in one’s life. When it comes to making social sales at Quirky as an affiliate marketer, how and where you direct your efforts will largely dictate whether or not you make any money. Affiliate marketing is all about finding the buyers — uniting a shopper with the product they want.

    Twitter and Facebook: As has already been stated, Twitter and Facebook are two excellent places to go to find people searching for advice on products to buy. Search.twitter.com can be an excellent tool to find people searching for advice in real time. For example a quick search there for the word “compost” reveals a number of individuals wanting to learn about composting, but complaining about not having space to do it! How nice of you to suggest the Keiro to them! You may even get a thank you once you tell them they can make money themselves by committing to buy it in pre-sale! Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

    Niche Communities: Thanks to the wonders of the interwebs, no matter what your interest is you can find a group, community, or forum full of like-minded individuals. These small niche communities are perfect places to make social sales. Look at a Quirky product for sale and ask yourself, “What kinds of people would find this useful?” Make a list. For example, look at the HydraDuo. This is one invention I can’t wait to see go into production (second only to the Waffler!) Who would find this useful? Runners, weight lifters, travelers, the list goes on. Next you go out and find some of the major communities, forums, and blogs for these kinds of people. A quick search for running forums reveals a number of great communities to start with.

    Now you’ve found your target audience, next comes selling to them. Selling is an art unto itself, and would be a blog post (or two!) all of its own. It is essential that you don’t come off as a marketer, spamming the forums with links and pushing products. Instead, make yourself a valuable contributing member of their community. Perhaps you could create a forum topic “What’s the best water bottle for running?” and list a few water bottles including the Hydra Duo in some of your favorites. Or once you have built up some trust on the forum, you could post a review of the Hydra Duo, mention how amazing it is, and how it needs to be made, and how buyers can make money by committing to buy it in pre-sale! Use your imagination, be creative, and try different things.

    These communities come in many shapes and sizes, and a creative marketer will find ways to reach the individuals there and show them how awesome Quirky products are. If you can’t find a community for a product, then you could always create using free services like Ning.

    Find the places where people are asking questions and seeking advice, look for ways you can unite a searcher with a product, think outside the box and avoid the herd at all costs… and you just may find that your social sales start going up!

    Got any tips of your own to share? Head to the forum to continue the discussion!

  • Fri, Sep 10 2010

    Say howdy to multi-talented Texan, Barbara Curtis! She has racked up some impressive wins in her short time with Quirky, from the winning idea for Product Round 0054, Unhampered, to the logo designs for Trek Support and Twice. She also finds time to do web/graphic design, run a car wash, and work on a line of iPad bags. With all that going on, why does the lovely Babs spend time with us at Quirky?

    Well, in her words, “What I love about Quirky is it brings people together. I have shared this site with my friends and family. Now I get to talk about submissions and taglines with my husband who is in Iraq and my twin sister who is totally hooked on Quirky now too. It really works on multiple levels to bring people together.”

    Thanks for becoming a part of the Quirky family, Barbara! We think you’re swell.

  • Fri, Sep 3 2010

    Meet Mr. Right. Josh Wright, that is! Josh has snagged wins in a variety of development phases like ID for Fit Kit, product naming for Steeper Keeper, and tagline for Pivot Power, which makes him quite the renaissance man. In addition to helping Quirky create great products, he also finds time to jump into forum discussions and tweet at us all day long.

    So why does he spend so much time with us? In his own words, “I am super passionate about Quirky, and what you guys are trying to do, and am super stoked that I get to be a part of something so ground breaking, which in my mind, will change the way the world creates!!” Wow, that definitely sums up why we love what we do. Cheers to that, Josh!

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