We allow Quirky community members to place a presale commitment for up to 25 units of any product. As a community member, you are guaranteed presale influence as long as you complete your commitment within the set timeframe after the product becomes available for shipping, and otherwise comply with the terms and conditions governing your use of quirky.com.

If you want to place a commitment for more than 25 units for any products, it is no longer considered a standard customer order and there are different rules and restrictions.

You will not receive presales influence for more than 25 units.

You must pay up front, in full for all units in a bulk order.

You must sign a retail term agreement.

If you want to commit to more than 25 units here’s what to do.

1. Place a commitment for 25 units as you normally would through your Quirky account. This will guarantee that you are eligible for presales influence, subject to your compliance with the conditions detailed above.

2. Email questions@quirky.com and let us know how many additional units you want of which product.

3. A member of the Quirky finance team will reach out to you with a credit card authorization form and a retail term agreement that will need to be completed, signed and sent back to Quirky.

If you have any questions feel free to submit them as comments on this post, or you can email them to questions@quirky.com.

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!

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.

A big congrats to ideator Bill Ward (a former Quirk o’ the Week) and all the community members who rallied during the final sales push. They’ll get a hunk of the 25 percent pre-sales influence that was up for grabs, plus they’ll be able to say that they played a role in bringing this product to life.

Want a part of the action? While you won’t get any pre-sales discount or influence, you can still snatch up the Broom Groomer for the super-low retail price of $12.

The Broom Groomer is a sweeping improvement in dustpans.

Here is what makes this dustpan so awesome:

- A row of rubber teeth protruding from the back end of the dust pan to clean the broom’s bristles when you’re done sweeping. No more dust bunnies!

- A foot rest built right into the dustpan handle, so that your foot can steady the dustpan for hands-free sweeping.

The main body of the Broom Groomer is made out of hard, durable plastic, with rubber accents on the handle grip, wall-hanging hole, bristle cleaning teeth, and front edge guard.

If you don’t know, now you know, Quirks.

Pivot Power just hit threshold, in a rapid-fire FOUR DAYS. Wahoo!

The blogs are loving this product. Some choice quotes:

We think Quirky, the “social product development company” that relies on crowdsourcing for its design and engineering teams, may have their first mass-market hit on their hands… — Core77

The community-driven Quirky website has already managed to bring products like the Space Bar and DigiDude camera mount to market, and it’s now offering what may well be its most useful product to date: the Pivot Power strip. — Engadget

Ok, so this is legitimately great. Ninety percent of the stuff I write about… meh. It’s called the Pivot Power, and it’s a electrical outlet that changes shape, allowing you to snake it around corner, shoes, the giant Xbox 360 power supply, and other obstructions. Pretty amazing, this. — CrunchGear

… thanks to Quirky’s Pivot Power, you’ll no longer have to worry about turning into a rage filled maniac when you’re trying to plug in your gear, as they’ve designed a completely flexible power strip that assures that all of those horribly shaped power bricks don’t hog up all of the space … Awesome, right? Of course it is. My only question is, is why in the hell did it take until 2010 for something like this to be developed?! — Blast

Sometime my email brings me nothing but endless useless PR pitches, offers to talk with an “expert” on iPad cases or just the usual offers to help export $6 million worth of Viagra from Nigeria. I live through these for the occasional Perfect Storm, a product that makes my gadget-sense tingle, something which not only ticks, but tickles every box on my emotional gee-gaw checklist. Today is such a day. — Wired Gadget Lab

Here’s to a hit!

We’ve been working on CnC in-house since it passed the 65 percent threshold mark, which means we’re ready to move right along into production thanks to a big distributor order that came through this morning.

Check out CnC’s story here:

This is particularly great news for all the community members that influenced this product. Since Click n Cook was launched before our 30% direct-10% indirect sale influence split went into effect, we’ll be sharing 30 percent of ALL THIS PRODUCT’S REVENUE, direct or indirect, with the community!

A big congrats to ideator Fred Ende and his darling wife Laurie, as well as to all of the Quirky community members who rallied around CnC. It’s because of their dedication and creative promotional efforts that we’re able to manufacture yet another hit product. Rock!

After 325 days, we’ve moved SlingBack into production.

As many of you know, this has sparked both an internal/external conversation about product aging and how it should affect the threshold process. We have a bunch of thoughts, and we’ll continue to monitor the respective threads on this topic on the blog/forum.

At the end of the day, we agreed with many of your sentiments about keeping our word, etc. That, and we think Slingback is a great product.

We hope to address the aging/threshold stuff in the next few weeks. But for now, congratulations to everyone on pushing product #14 to threshold.

The Quirky MugStir is a portable spoon that hangs onto the side of a coffee mug or cup of tea. Bring your MugStir to work to replace those nasty communal spoons, or to avoid wasting a new plastic spoon every time you need to stir a hot beverage.

The MugStir features:

- A handle that clips to the side of your mug, rubber-coated to protect the mug from scratches and your fingers from burns.

- A spoon that holds about 1/2 a teaspoon of liquid and acts as an ideal stirrer for your hot (or cold) beverage.

MugStir’s dimensions are approximately 3in tall x 1.25in wide x 1in deep. The product comes in packs of three, so feel free to keep a spoon at work, a spoon at home, and a spoon with you when you’re on the go!

A big congratulations to ideator Judi Sigler, who really pushed the social sales on this product. Not only did she create a Twitter feed (@MugStir), she also made a Facebook fan page and a website! She’s proof of what a bit of creativity can accomplish!

Quirky should be just as powerful in killing mediocre ideas as it is in pushing great ideas forward.

Threshold lets us be sure that the ideas/products that we take a substantial amount of risk on are going to perform well in the marketplace. It’s not our desire to design/develop one product per week for the sake of designing one product per week. We don’t want to create more landfill, we want to create products people want and/or need.

It helps pace the business.

Designing one product per week is a tall order… having the product spend time in the store gaining traction allows us to use that time to go through a full process behind the scenes in order to fully engineer the product, prototype it, test it, and get it FULLY ready to go into production.

It allows influencers to vote with their wallets.

Votes and comments and ideas are all great. But when we see a product fly off our virtual shelf, we know we have a winner, and we are more motivated to put a substantial investment behind it.

It gives us fabulously predictive data.

One thing we love about threshold is we hope it will make our business fairly predictive. If we know the product sells 29 units per hour, via Quirky, we are able to extrapolate that out into models to determine how the product will perform in distribution, etc. — allowing us to take an aggressive, but comfortable amount of risk on that particular product. Obviously, what we are looking for with this data is an indication of near guaranteed market success.

This brings us to the problem at hand:

What should we do about products that have been on the site for a very long time and have still not hit threshold?

There is obviously a case to be made that an aging product that hasn’t hit threshold just isn’t a good product, given the amount of time it has lingered on the site.

The other worry, is that given enough time, everything will hit threshold… just naturally. Problem with that is that the people who committed 10 months ago no longer want the product, slow trajectory of sales is a negative indicator of the marketability of the product, etc. etc. etc.

In this, the first of many in a “Help Us Decide” series, I will start the conversation with a few of our internal ideas on this problem, and let you guys take it from there.

A forum topic has been started, and we’d like the conversation to happen there.

We will make a decision next week, on April 1st.

Here are the options, as I see them:

1. Increase threshold with product age. So far, this is my favorite. Basically, as a product ages, say every 2 weeks or so, we will increase the threshold by a certain percentage (actual number TBD). This will guarantee that products that hit threshold are on a proper trajectory indicative of future market success.
2. Set a timer. Just like Quirky development projects, we can set a timer for threshold to be hit. If the product does not hit in the predefined time, the idea gets sent to the  graveyard… where we may choose to resurrect the product for events, upon demand/request, etc.
3. Whatever else you guys think of... This is just an early look at what I hope will be an exciting conversation. We are hoping that you guide us and provide us with a ton of food for thought. In your suggestions be sure to remember the reasons why we use the threshold model (detailed above).

An important thing to remember is that we are in no way trying to make it harder for products to get made — we want nothing more than to create great products. We are just simply trying to assure, for the health of the company and the community, that the products that do hit threshold are, in-fact, great ones.

So, faithful Quirks: Help Us Decide.

Sling Back (Quirky’s first-ever product!): 569 out of 625 –> 91% –>  56 to go

Wrapster: 642 out of 720 –> 89% –> 78 to go

MugStir: 514 out of 630 –> 82% –> 116 to go

Let’s blog, Facebook, Tweet… whatever it takes to round up some more sales! I know you all can do it.