Failure Stories #1
“My Portable Charger Story”
I am very far from being considered successful, and that is ok. I am 27 years old, and I call myself a serial entrepreneur. I have decided to share my stories with you because there are far too little failure and mediocre stories out there that I can relate to personally. I feel down when I see all the instant success stories polished about unbelievably fortunate, intelligent and hard working people. That makes me feel like there is no room for someone who is starting out and making mistakes. So I encourage myself and others like me to put our stories and feel less lonely and worried because every journey starts one step at a time.
I am a young adult trying to get the most out of life, but like everyone in my shoes, I am facing a choice to buy things or rent them. Ownership became an inconvenience and a luxury in a crowded mega-city like London. So like the majority of young people I prefer to pay for access to things when I want them and not worry about them when we don’t.
Since university years I was passionate about consumer electronics. Working on sound systems, installations and more… one niche captured my attention the most, and it was a problem I was facing every day. There was no right solution out there. “The problem was a DEAD BATTERY!”
My phone was always dead, and I had carried chargers, power-banks, and a case with an extra battery every day. It was a job to manage my power, and I jumped on an opportunity to attempt to resolve it not just for myself but for others as well. I took on a challenge to design a right device that would be transportable, healthy for your battery and wouldn’t require any extra work to manage. It was a charger with an inbuilt battery that would also fold flat for easy carrying. I designed the solution and was proud! The device did exactly what I wanted it to, It would charge your phone, and when the phone was 100% it would start charging itself than you would take both with you! Job well done!
I called it MOE. I proudly presented my work at London Design Week and MDX Design final year Art and Design show.
I graduated and ventured to set up a business and produce MOE for retail. Unfortunately, the team building, legal arrangements, patents bureaucracy and high minimal orders in manufacturing were too massive of a load for a broke graduate. So I published the project on Behance, and it was a highlight of my portfolio.
Several months later when I was already working in logistics tech company, I got an email from one of the engineers I was recruiting to do MOE. The email contained a worrisome message and a link to a Kickstarter campaign. “Someone plagiarised my design.”
MOE was called a different name and was advertised word for word as in my portfolio. I didn’t hesitate, I contacted the imposters and attached the head of the engineering department of my University as legally all the rights to the products developed in the program belong to University. I demanded to take the campaign down, or I will escalate this to the Kickstarter staff, and they will be banned from the platform and legal actions will take place.
But to be honest, as outraged as I was, I was happy that the idea had been picked up and continued its life beyond my portfolio page. Several days later I got a reply, and the founder was a young guy who showed me his development work on his Kickstarter. We had a long chain of emails back and forth. Eventually, I gave in and agreed to take part in his fundraising. I got a payout from the money raised, and that story was over.
They never released any new products and struggled to deliver gadgets to their backers.


I thought that chapter of my life was over, but four years later I am back in my product design shoes, trying to fix the same problem. What I learned was that no matter how fancy a charger is it is still a piece of hardware that you own and maintain. No energy saving cable features, flexibility, foldability, compact size or excessive mAh will solve the actual problem that is that you have to manage it! You have to think about it, and it creates a cognitive load that takes away from other things in your life and adds stress where it shouldn’t.
The right solution would be to have these charge spots everywhere you go and at your fingertips when you need it. So my partner and I once again set down at the whiteboard and sketched a solution to meet the challenge head once again first.
We came up with an idea to create a network of charging stations where you can pick up a power back, take it with you, charge on the go and drop it off in the next available PowerBank station.
Several companies have entered the market with a similar proposition:
1. Mobijuce
“Why bring a bulky and heavy mobile charger or power bank with you when you can rent one for as little as HK$ 2? Enjoy our service anytime, anywhere, with no deposit required! Our JuceBox are available across Hong Kong, and we’re adding new locations each week! “
mobijuce.com
2. AnkerBox
“AnkerBox launches charging-as-a-service” TechCrunch wrote a story about them (https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/29/anker-ankerbox/)
The opportunity for a better charging is still out there and companies are racing to fill in the gap in the market.
