RachelThe best advice I’ve gotten so far is to design and create things that I dream of buying and owning. Those things that I’m interested in seeing on the market.
It’s not just the product itself, but how it works. Is it easy to use? Does it have nice fitting parts? There’s nothing worse than spending your hard-earned money on a product that makes you think “cheap” or that breaks in the first 5 uses. My kids are young now, but in a few years, I’ll give them a copy of all of our products. And maybe, if I’m lucky, one of them will pursue a career in optics. If not, they’ll know they could if they wanted to, and that’s enough for me.
We’ve gone through 3 prototypes of our first laser learning kit since September, and then come now to the point of asking ourselves: should it be more modular? Do we want to be able to reuse our light sources for other experiments? This is a highly involved question because it raises the price to get to market dramatically.
In case you, like me before I started this company, have no idea the cost of making plastic parts, I’ll give you the same starting point I have: the U.S.A. quotes we have for machining the mold for the top half of the main body are at minimum $12,000. It’s not a very complicated piece. That’s before you even think about making any parts. Or anything that’s inside. Wow. I thought plastic was cheap (for the record, the actual plastic parts are not that bad, it’s the initial hurdle that is high for starting out and adds substantial cost to each part until you produce a lot of them).
These last few months we have come to understand in a much deeper way why we see “Made in China” on almost all the things we own.
I value international trade, but I also think we should support our own. So, at every turn we are trying to use Made in the U.S.A. parts wherever possible and stretching geographically from there for environmental reasons. I’m not sure yet where the road will lead, but it highly depends on the funds we get to kick off our initial products.
So, please support our Kickstarter project when we launch it! We will repost a link here and elsewhere on the website when it becomes available.
– Rachel