How We Developed Phone Toaster
In many respects, development of the Phone Toaster project has been a long road, even though we only started in September of last year. There are many steps that must be processed when preparing a product for a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, from ideation to fulfillment. It’s a busy process!
Here’s a peek into Phone Toaster’s history, and a bit of a sneak preview of what’s to come:
Step 1: The Survey
Our team leader, Bong Ju Lee, had a notion to create a new phone sanitizer late last summer. That’s right, Phone Toaster was conceived before COVID-19 hit. Bong Ju has a young son, and he wanted to create a product that would protect his family’s health.
In order to take this seed and grow it into an actual innovative concept, we needed to discover how to make a *better* phone sanitizer. In order to accomplish this goal, we used Open Survey. We ran surveys through 2000 people, identifying pain points in their daily routines regarding phone usage, and drilling down to find the best way to incorporate a sanitizer into their lifestyles.
What we found was that most people are unwilling to sanitize their phones during the day, but that it would be easy for them to sanitize at night while they sleep. There’s our concept! Next step: design.
<Click to Learn More About Phone Toaster>
Step 2: Crowdsourced Design
For design, we also engaged with the public to make sure the final product would appeal to as many different people as possible. We used a crowd design platform called ‘Loud’ to arrive at the final look. The platform works like a kind of a design contest, so that many different designers from many walks of life participated in the process of designing Phone Toaster.
Step 3: Prototyping
The next step is prototyping, which is a very tricky and arduous step. First prototypes are always difficult to make, and the result is usually not perfectly sturdy. We had trouble with the sanitizer control lever from the very beginning, requiring two trips back to the manufacturing team for repairs! We’re lucky that the second version of our prototype works flawlessly.
Step 4: Certification
We also sent our UV-C LEDs to a laboratory for testing and certification. KCL tested our sanitizer against E-coli and Staphylococcus aureus, two common and dangerous bacteria. They passed with flying colors, completely eradicating all bacteria from every sample.
Step 5: Crowdfunding
We just launched our product via crowdfunding on Kickstarter. We are very committed to presenting Phone Toaster to the world as a crowd-backed product, as we strongly believe it’s something that everyone in the world could benefit from.
There’s also another step related to crowdfunding that we haven’t mentioned yet: marketing. Actually, marketing is a huge, expensive part of every crowdfunding campaign, and it’s a lot of work. Shout out to our wonderful marketing team!
Step 6: Mass Production
Phone Toaster enters mass production starting in September. It will take about two months to complete all of the orders. We are in the process of preparing for this step right now.
Step 7: Backer Fulfillment
Once our thousands of Phone Toasters have been prepared, we will be able to finally send them out to our backers in November. (As anybody who has ever run a Kickstarter before knows, this is actually an exhausting step in the process, and thus deserves it’s own mention. Mailing out thousands of parcels at the same time is no small feat! :)
Step 8: Retail
After all of our backers are in possession of their Phone Toasters, we will then start rolling out the product to the global retail market. But keep an eye out: we’ll have a bulk package reward tier for retailers who want to back our Kickstarter campaign to receive their first Phone Toaster order at a discount, so you’ll be seeing some PTs pop up in on and offline stores by November — just in time for Christmas.
It’s certainly been a lengthy process, but worth every minute. We are extremely excited about our recent Kickstarter launch and so proud to finally introduce our product to the global market. We have high expectations for Phone Toaster — fingers crossed!
Phone Toaster is available now on Kickstarter. Our $74 Super Early Bird is already sold out—don’t miss your chance to get Phone Toaster at a sale price! Sign up via the link below:
And don’t forget to follow us on social media, and tell your friends!
