Microwaving Pants— A Startup Postmortem

Our final functional prototype. It’s not supposed to burn pants, but it does.

After much investigation, we have determined that microwaving your clothing is not a superior alternative for ironing. Thus, we have decided to shut down our startup.

It pains me to write such a sentence — largely because it means acknowledging failure, but also because it makes me sound like a crazy person.

For the past six months, Christian Zachrich and I have been toiling away on Quasar Creative (our startup). Our goal was to build a microwaveable clothing steamer that would “Take your clothes from terrible to wearable in just 5 minutes flat!” We thought it was an appealing premise and one that could draw in support from people, like ourselves, who were too lazy to iron and okay with putting random stuff in a microwave.

Unfortunately, and despite our best efforts to the contrary, we could not solve a simple underlying problem: clothing lights on fire when you put it in the microwave.*

Conversations with potential customers revealed this to be a major pain point.

We did our darnedest to fix this problem, but we never managed to find a really good way around it. We thought we fixed it a couple of times, but in the end, our patent pending invention couldn’t stop our pants from catching fire.

Although we didn’t discover a revolutionary method for clothing care, we did learn a great deal along the way. I’m sure that many much more talented and more interesting people have written about these same learnings, but I’m going to take a swing at it anyway. It wouldn’t be a proper startup postmortem if I didn’t.

Learning #1

Only do stuff that you really care about. Don’t do other stuff.

Believe it or not, I’m not really all that passionate about getting wrinkles out of clothing. Sure, I hate ironing and I think there should be a better solution — but it’s not really the thing that keeps me up at night.

What I care about is toys. Christian and I met while working for Hasbro, and I had ridden a dreadful 20-hour bus to Indiana in Fall 2015 to convince him to start a toy company with me. He agreed on the condition that we do a few smaller projects first — this being project #1. After all, we figured, we could finish this in a weekend or two. Lol.

The thing about starting a startup is that if it goes poorly, you’ll be working on it for a few months. If it goes well, you’ll be with it for years. People really just don’t live long enough to spend years on something they only kind of care about.

Learning #2

Do your own prototyping, even if you have no idea how.

If you’re building a physical product, you should make the first few prototypes yourself. (I assume the same would go for coding, but frankly, I don’t know much about coding.) You don’t have to be able to make a beautiful full-fledged model, but you should be able to build an ugly working prototype.

It’s just too expensive and too time consuming to hire someone else to build all your models. Also, the first time that you build a prototype, you probably don’t actually know what you need in your product.

Our process went like this:

• Prototype 1: We think we need a plastic box.
• Prototype 2: We’ll need more than a plastic box. (Fire)
• Prototype 3: A metal box seems to stop pants from burning.
• Prototype 4: A mesh metal box lights itself on fire. (Fire)
• Prototype 5: Stainless steel isn’t conductive enough to protect clothes. (Minor burn damage)
• Prototype 6: Aluminum is great. Bigger box = fewer wrinkles. We need a bigger aluminum box.
• Prototype 7: There is a minimum wall thickness for the metal box. It’s greater than aluminum foil. (Fire)
• Prototype 8: Thick walled aluminum box works well. Polypropylene makes for a great case/holding area.

My point is that there was no way that we could have known all the details we needed in our final prototype without making the prototypes before it. It took each successive prototype to be able to build the next one.

If we had infinite money, I suppose we could have hired someone to build each, but that’s a terrible way to run a startup — you’re not even really involved and you’re going to burn right through whatever funds you have.

Learning #3

You’re not invincible.

At least, I’m not. After hearing stories about people like Stephen Hassenfeld, Elon Musk, and Marissa Mayer who work insane hours and sacrifice everything for their cause, it’s tempting to try and do what they do/did.

If you’re starting a startup, you should be prepared to work your heart out. If you want a chance at success, you’ll have to. The thing to realize is that it sucks.

You can’t cheat the clock. You can only cut back on sleep so much until the time has to come from somewhere else. You’ll have to give up a lot of fun things to find time for a startup, and you probably still won’t have time to sleep as much as you’d like.

People often talk about startups being a rollercoaster — with ups and downs of excitement/despair.

I’d say that’s pretty accurate. Sometimes I was sure that we had figured out the next big thing. Other times I was positive that I had spent five months microwaving my socks for no good reason.

The thing I hadn’t heard much about is how those highs and lows compound with your lack of sleep.

Setbacks and failures suck, but they suck much more when you haven’t had a proper sleep in a few days. It’s really hard to start building a new prototype after the last one fails when all you really want is a nap.

I found going for runs and long walks to be the most helpful thing for getting over a rough patch. Aside from that, try to find other people who are also working on projects with a lot of setbacks.

Learning #4

The ins and outs of microwaving your clothes.

This might not be the most helpful piece of knowledge, but it is the only one where I have relative expertise. By my estimations, it is likely that I was microwaving more shirts per day than any other human on the planet. At the very least, I hope that to be the case. I fear for the well-being of the person who microwaves more clothing than I.

If you want to microwave your clothing, I suggest that you don’t (even though I do still microwave a piece here and there when I’m in a pinch). It’s easy to get wrong and you might destroy your clothes/apartment. Even if you get it right, you still might burn your clothes.

That said, here’s what you need to know:

1. Wrinkle removal is primarily about heat, much more so than about the wetness of steam. So you want your clothes hot.
2. Microwaves do a really good job at heating up water.
3. Microwaves will occasionally ignite clothing. Elastic bands seem particularly prone to fire.
4. A metal box around your clothes will form a Faraday cage and protect your clothes from the microwaves (We thought this was our big breakthrough).
5. Small holes in that metal box will allow steam to enter while keeping microwaves out (we used 1mm diameter).
6. That metal box needs to have smooth edges, no large gaps, no long slits, and no uncovered sides. Otherwise you will have sparking.
7. The metal has to be solid — don’t use chicken wire. Sweet balderdash, really don’t use that.
8. The box can’t touch — or come close to touching — any of the internal microwave walls.
9. You’ll want to slightly lift the clothes off the bottom of the metal box internally — otherwise you’ll get uneven steaming and wet spots.
10. A bit of de-wrinkle solution does wonders! It can even make your clothes smell fresh.
11. Don’t use de-wrinkle solution in your food microwave… it’s not “food safe.”
12. Polypropylene is a great plastic to use in the microwave. High melting temp, microwave safe, etc.
13. We found ~5 minutes to be the best time usually, but it’ll differ depending on the depth of your water and power of your microwave. We usually saw boiling start around 3.5 minutes in or so.
14. Right after microwaving, I recommend spreading the clothing on a smooth surface like a clean table or stiff couch. Then wear it right away.
15. Some clothes will get damaged or burnt simply because they can’t handle boiling water temperatures. I think the metal compounds this problem (it heats up while “blocking” microwaves).
16. If you run it multiple times in series, you tend to get burn marks, if not fires.

15 and 16 were what finally killed this project once and for all. Our wrinkle reduction never got better than bringing something to wearable, and just barely there. I hope this serves as a discouragement rather than a guide to anyone considering microwaving their clothes. There are better methods out there.

Conclusion and Thanks

Something that never ceased to amaze me throughout the past six months was how many people were willing to help us along the way. I would have expected that gaining support for a microwaveable clothing steamer start-up would have been an up-hill battle, but instead I found that people were incredibly willing to share their time and resources with us.

We’d like to particularly thank the Wharton Venture Initiation Program and the Wharton Innovation Fund that generously provided us both working space and working capital. Additionally thank you to Patrick FitzGerald and Jeffrey Babin who gave us great advice and mentoring along the way. Thank you to the other members of the Penn and Purdue entrepreneurial communities who supported us at every turn. Thanks to all our friends in Philly and West Lafayette.

Christian is returning to Purdue in the fall for a final semester. I’ve just started working at Hasbro and am very happy to be working in toys again. Thanks for reading. Here are some random pictures of the Tidy(UP) Microwaveable Clothing Steamer and process:

Our prettiest rendered exploded view.

Same virtual model, but at a cutaway view. Arrows indicate steam flow.

Before and after running in the final prototype. It didn’t get rid of all the wrinkles, but it did get rid of most.

Interior view of final prototype. There’s a water basin beneath the inner metal box. The little black specks on the lid and bottom are thousands of tiny holes for steam flow. The white bars kept the clothing off the holes.

Prototype 3 — made from an old cookie tin and a bowl. Got very steamy, but didn’t get rid of any wrinkles.

Prototype 4 — made from aluminum mesh. Don’t do this. Sweet glory. It lit up like a firework.

Me drilling additional holes into Prototype 6. Fun fact — those pants have a hole burnt into them now. I liked those pants.

One of the “workbenches” we used. Note the shards of broken glass on the ground.

Thanks again. If I could go back and do it over, I would.

*Technically, not all clothing. I’ve yet to lose a sweater. Still — consistently burning some clothing is enough of a failure to call this a day.