Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small batch production to win
If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge.
It typically makes products in huge quantities with pretty slim margins. To recoup development, tooling, and launch marketing costs, you must build and sell a large number of products. To make sure that's possible, you'll probably end up doing a lot of user and market research to make sure you have the best chance of success with your products.
That makes sense, but the business model itself means it's hard to do anything truly risky, which in turn means that the major manufacturers rarely come up with anything truly innovative.
If there were a device for mushroom fruiting, would there be many more people growing mushrooms at home on a regular basis? There was only one way to find out: build one and try to sell it.
That's where FirstBuild comes in. If you are a fan of small appliances, you may have seen their Opal Nugget Ice Maker, the studio's first major breakthrough; the Mella fungus fruiting chamber; on indoor pizza oven; o the Arden indoor smoker. I spoke with André Zdanow, president of FirstBuild, to find out where these ideas came from and how the studio is working to try to replicate those successes.
“The most famous example is probably the Opal nugget ice machine. At first, it wasn't really a product at all: it was a technology that was being worked on in the refrigeration division of GE Appliances,” Zdanow said, explaining that it turned out to be a headache. They wanted to put the "ice nugget" in a cooler, but couldn't figure out exactly what the size of the market would be for such a thing. “It's actually very complicated to put the technology in a refrigerator. In other words, it was a really great idea that engineers had been toying with for years, but in the context of the focus and economics of a multi-billion dollar company, it wasn't something they could focus on.”
The Opal nugget ice machine was FirstBuild's first commercial success. Image credits: FirstBuild
In a parallel universe, that technology would never have seen the light of day, but instead, engineers came to FirstBuild and wondered what would happen if they put the technology in a separate appliance, rather than a full-size refrigerator.
“We see a lot of people going to the store and buying this type of ice. They call it sonic ice or hospital ice. We decided to develop a prototype and see if people want it to be just an ice machine,” Zdanow explained. That was the genesis of the success of the FirstBuild lab. “He started with crude concepts that looked like an ice machine but contained ice nuggets. From there, it progressed through industrial design and ultimately to a $2,7 million crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in 2015."
