aarn: available now: cuppow [product]
It was probably right around the beginning of spring last year when my friend Joshua Resnikoff said that he wanted to talk to me about an idea that he and his wife Christine had been bouncing around. Resnikoff, who was/is finishing his masters of science in biomedical engineering at Tufts, wanted to make a to-go cup lid for a mason jar. At first I thought that it was a dumb idea, but the more I thought about it, the less dumb it sounded (and now I don’t think that it is dumb at all!). I did a little research and came up with a potentially novel retention and closure technique. I designed a version that was made from stainless steel and hydroformed from a disc of sheet stock.
We then realized that due to the temperature issue with the stainless and potentially hot liquids inside of the jar, that plastic would be better. I did a rough plastic design, and a few months later we had an SLA prototype made. I kept tweaking the design, but nothing too ambitious happened again on the project until we stumbled upon an amazing intellectual property lawyer named Noah Sachs. Once a lawyer was on-board things really started to move…that was about a month ago.
We put together an awesome team of designers and creatives, all of whom work with/near me at Fringe. After the plastic design was finalized and material was selected, Natalya Zahn (who works about 20 feet behind me and 2 feet to the right) designed some amazing packaging graphics based on the geometry of a custom die that I had brainstormed together with Mike Dacey (of Repeat Press, 10 feet to the right of my desk). Once the packaging graphics were done, those were passed 100 feet down the hall to Mike Kivikoski (from Atedrake) who designed a website around the aesthetics and color palette of the packaging.
Once the custom die for cutting the packaging and the printing plates arrived, Mike Dacey printed and cut the packaging in his letterpress shop (15 feet to the right of his desk). Then Stebs Shinnerer (of Paper Fortress Films) got involved and shot and edited a promo video in one day (10 feet behind my desk), and we finished up with a photo shoot in New Black Studio (10 feet behind Stebs’ desk). These people are amazing. I could not be happier with the completed product. Check out the website and buy a Cuppow for only $7.99!
[edit] Here’s the promo video!
