Newsletters!
The Long, Distinguished History of TableFare
Greetings!
Let us start off by saying thank you for signing up for our newsletter! We figured this would be the best way to keep everyone up to date as to what we’re doing with TableFare and we’re so happy to see how many people are interested in following along with our progress.
In this newsletter we’re going to start at the very beginning and describe why we undertook this venture and where we are with our product development. This should help get everyone caught up to the same spot, and hopefully will make it so we can stop having to say, “you mean we forgot to tell you that?” One side-effect, however, is that this newsletter will probably be rather wordy; they should be much shorter in the future.
In the Beginning, There was Frustration
As most all of you know, Carol loves to create things in the kitchen: elaborate cakes, trays of handcrafted chocolates, or full-blown party spreads for 100 are all fair game. But over the years, she has found herself repeatedly cursing the absence of certain tools and gadgets in the marketplace… things that seemed so obvious and useful that it was boggling that no one was already making them. As the years passed and these products still didn’t exist, she started thinking that maybe she’d have to be the one to do something about it.
D.I.Y.
A couple years ago, Carol decided to take on her single biggest annoyance: spice jars. After searching high and low, to and fro, hither and yon, she came to the conclusion that all commercially available spice jars are severely lacking. None of them adequately address the issue of actually using them while cooking and thus we’re faced with an array of jars, bottles and tins that are clumsy to handle, difficult to measure out of and do not provide a proper seal to keep spices fresh. Interestingly enough, the thing that came closest to meeting her stringent requirements was a storage container sold for fishing bait, though it wasn’t exactly the high-end kitchen tool she longed for (there was also the minor issue of them not being made from food-safe materials).
Bye-bye Drugs, Hello Spices
About a year ago, we started discussing what it would take to create a company dedicated to manufacturing and selling these products and we did a lot of research to gauge the feasibility. Our initial step was to file a provisional patent application based on the rough design of the new spice jars that we had sketched out, if, for no other reason, it’s really cool to be able to say, “yeah, we’re patent pending.” We continued kicking around ideas and by the beginning of 2007, Carol’s obsession with making new kitchen tools was starting to eclipse her interest in continuing her career as a pharmaceutical rep so we decided to take the plunge. David ceased taking on any new consulting projects, and Carol tendered her resignation in April.
Ready, Set… uh, Go?
At this point, we had two main things to take care of: designing our first product and building the corporate structure to support it. One thing that we knew from the start was that we wanted to hire out virtually every aspect of this business to companies that know what they’re doing so as to not have to bring on a batch of employees.
After interviewing several west coast design companies, we selected Product Creation Studio, who are conveniently located just a few miles from us. They quickly grasped what we were trying to do with the new spice system (yes, it’s now a “system,” not just a collection of jars) and came up with a great design that we have been refining over the past couple months. They have added so many subtle improvements that we doubt we would have ever come up with on our own, so this has been money well spent.
Meanwhile, there was the little matter of getting a business in place. This is typically not that difficult of a thing to do, but we were missing one small, yet critical thing: a name. There’s really no way to overstate how difficult it can be to come up with a company name that 1) isn’t already in use, 2) doesn’t infringe on any existing trademarks, and 3) has available web addresses. After getting nowhere with English words we even started pouring through Swahili and other foreign dictionaries to find catchy words related to cooking. Whenever we found something that seemed like it might be a contender, we’d immediately register all the relevant domain names, just in case.
After two months with no definitive results, we turned to a local chap called the Name Inspector. After mulling it over for about an hour, he asked us how we liked TableFare. We loved it. It was available. We were able to lock down all the web domains. We had our name! The funny thing is that we had danced around very minor variations of that name over and over again, but had never put those exact syllables together. With the name in place we filed our incorporation papers, got all our registrations and permits and even opened a bank account. Somewhat anticlimactically, we were in business.
Where We Are…
Right now we are about to send the latest CAD files from Product Creation Studio to a prototyping house down in Portland to create a couple sample containers. We know these won’t be perfect, but it’s extremely exciting to get to the point of having actual functional items that we can play with and test. We have no doubt that we’ll learn a lot from this step and should come up with some invaluable improvements. At that point we will likely opt to create a high-end prototype, something that would be almost indistinguishable from the actual manufactured product.
Once that prototype is in place and we have some very basic marketing material in place, Carol is going to start talking with some key people to assess the viability of the product in the upper-scale kitchen marketplace. We see this as a Go/No-Go breakpoint. Obviously we hope the feedback is positive and makes us feel confident about moving into the tooling and manufacturing stages. But if we get different news we’ll have the opportunity to reassess things before committing any large sums of money. And let’s not forget the dozen or so other ideas that Carol is working on at any given moment. We’re also very excited about the progress that our good friend Kate Thompson is making on our company logo and color palette, so we should soon be able to spiff up the appearance of the web site and these newsletters.
… And Where We’re Going
And with that, all of you now know everything worth knowing about the creation of TableFare! We apologize that some of you have inadvertently been left in the dark these past few months, but it quickly became difficult to keep track of who knew what. You’ll probably hear from us more in the coming months as we pull together informal focus groups to review our prototype devices. Meanwhile, we’ll keep trying to think of ways to make your kitchen life better!
Regards,
Carol and David Peterman