Lily is a ten year old girl who’s into pottery. Her grandpa has Parkinson’s disease and is prone to spilling his coffee due to his tremors, and so she invented the “Kangaroo Cup,” a stackable, reusable cup that is hard to knock over or spill from (she modified it for her dad’s use, so that he wouldn’t spill coffee in his keyboard anymore, too). It’s got a inward-curving lip to make it less spill-prone when you carry it, and its legs make it super-stable (you also don’t need a coaster for it).
Lily’s dad is a product designer who’s brought other products to market successfully, so he and his daughter are raising funds on IndieGoGo for bulk manufacture (in JingDeZhen, China) and sale.
We are launching this project to fund our first production run of 1000 pieces. The samples pictured here and in the video are 1st production samples made at the same facility that will do the production run. The facility we’ve selected for this first run is not a mass production, low cost factory, but a high quality porcelain producer that generally makes decorative vases and tea pots and such. They make the kind of ceramics that JingDeZhen is famous for: “white as jade, bright as a mirror, and harmonic as a bell.” In addition, because they are high temperature fired, they are stronger and less porous that standard ceramics. This makes them more hygienic, easier to clean and harder to stain.
We chose JingDeZhen for our source because of the high quality and the ability of the artisans there to help us work through our initial production issues. If the project is successful, we will likely need to move to more conventional manufacturing sources to reduce cost, but today, JingDeZhen China provides a nice reward for our early supporters.
(Thanks, Alex!)