Hello thingCHARGER family…
The last month has been a busy one for us at thingCHARGER. In addition to getting our first patent from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, we’ve been hard at work finalizing the engineering, including a trip to the factory working with the engineers.
Much of the work is on the interchangeable tips that will allow thingCHARGER to work with any mobile device out there.
Interestingly enough, we’ve found this to be the real challenge in the engineering of thingCHARGER, not the internal electronics or the plastic shell (although making the tooling as beautiful and strong as you deserve is still an amazingly slow and painstaking process!).
What is most difficult is designing quality tips that must:
1: Adjust up and down to fit devices with or without a case, and different thicknesses of cases. We didn’t initially plan this with thingCHARGER, but we had so many requests from you that we added it. It’s a fantastic and necessary feature, which needs real expertise to do well.
2: Grip tight once adjusted and be strong for repeated use.
3: Be engineered correctly at the highest quality, so your mobile devices are completely safe at all times. We’ve seen a bunch of chargers out there that haven’t properly considered the way the tip and the device engage and are either breaking themselves, or worse, the device, causing expensive repairs.
The bottom line is that churning out the kind of junk chargers you find all around is pretty easy. Doing this the right way - with focused attention on the utmost quality - to make something really great that will be really safe and beautiful and serve you for years, is hard. (As my friend and colleague Chris Hawker at Trident Design says, “It’s called Hardware because it is hard” and he’s right.) Just ask Apple about the iPhone 4. Remember when it took an extra year to bring the white one to market after launch when everyone thought it would be as easy to make as the black one.
This attention to quality is resulting in an awesome product of which we’ll all be proud, that you’ll be confident investing in again and recommending to friends and family.
Final note: As a couple striving to bring one of their ideas to market, we’re obviously learning a huge amount along the way about the entire process - and we know there’s a great deal more to know. What we’ve found is lacking out there is a real source on how to navigate this new world to help people who want to crowdfund.
We’re incredibly grateful for the support we’ve received and have been looking for a way of giving back a little and helping others. So, in a month or so, we’re going to take an hour or so a week to do some interviews with crowdfunding experts who will share the ends and outs of crowdfunding and make them available online. We’ll give you the link when the first one(s) are ready.
Thank you again for believing in us. Doing this kind of thing is a marathon, not a sprint, and your support means everything.
Amy, Seymour & the thingCHARGER team
