The Mason’s Mitre Worktop Trim, our first product launch 🚀
A couple of years ago we came up with the idea for the Pepr Mason’s Mitre Worktop Trim. If that doesn’t mean a lot to you, basically it’s a form of kitchen worktop trim that’s shaped slightly differently to fit corner cut worktops, as opposed to just straight joints.
Like all great and lasting products this was borne out of necessity. We’ve had many years experience of having to replace peoples entire worktops because the corner had become slightly water damaged and there’s no easy way of repairing or protecting it. The resulting cost of the work needed would spiral up into the £hundreds because the job required two or more pieces of replacement worktop, possibly a plumber or electrician, and hours worth of labour. After going through this process too many times we found ourselves asking; there’s got to be a better solution.
And there is! Go to any hardware store and you’ll find many different worktop trims available in all shapes and sizes, just not for corner worktop joints.
At first it seemed unbelievable that the product didn’t already exist in a hardware store somewhere, but after searching high and low it became apparent that this is in fact an original idea, so we set about patenting the shape.
This has been our first full public product launch, so we didn’t want to rush into anything too quickly, as with anything there’s been a very steep learning curve. In our early research phase we spoke with a few companies offering similar products and other forms of repair, in order to find out the potential reasons why this product wouldn’t already be on sale. This proved to be a useful exercise that left a lot of people scratching their heads, and ultimately encouraged us to go forward an put the idea into production.
When we took the decision to try and sell this ourselves, we had to undertake the process of determining our minimum viable product in order to keep the initial set up time and cost to a minimum before we could get the product out there. For us, this had to be considered throughout the whole of our customer’s experience, not just in terms of the product itself. In the future, we plan to launch more colour options, develop the website to include some installation videos, and expand our delivery radius further from just the UK. But right now we’re gaining some crucial feedback from the people who are happy to use the first version in the UK.
In terms of the website keeping it simple has been the order of the day, explaining the trim, distinguishing between the left and right version, and making it quick and easy for people to get their hands on it. People have mentioned to us about the idea of using a video to show the product and demonstrate the ease of installation. Yes, video has proven to be a fast and reliable way of conveying a message to customers, especially when you look at the success of a company like Dropbox who way back in the day launched their beta phase with essentially just a simple video showing their service in action — http://uxtimeline.com/dropbox.html
This is definitely not something we’ve ruled out for the future, and at the top of our wish list of people to feature demonstrating the trim would definitely have to be Tim ‘The Toolman’ Taylor’. But in time for launch for a product like ours, this would’ve added a lot of extra time and cost. More importantly though, it would’ve put back the time of getting our product in to the hands of real people, both workmen installing the trim, and homeowners living with the benefits afterwards. The feedback we’ve gained from even the first few items sold has been incredibly beneficial.
We’re pleased for it to finally be out there, but there’s still plenty of work to be done!
Interested, take a look for yourself www.masonsmitretrim.co.uk
