Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Aaron Horowitz: MakerCon New York 2014”.
Our next speaker is aaron horowitz he’s the co-founder of sprout. Tell uh became the hardware innovation workshop last year. I think he gave one of the better talks on his jerry, the bear uh, which he’s brought back and uh. It was fun to see all the different iterations of jerry and i’m sure, you’ll talk about that. Erin welcome to makercon.
Thank you grab one of these give jerry’s very own stool, so hi, it’s a pleasure to be here um. It’S a pleasure uh to have heard all of the incredible talks today and what i’d love to do is i’d love to share a little bit about jerry and then just walk you through our personal experience of how we navigated the waters of our first production run, Especially the process of going from making things one-off in our closet-sized office to making things in the hundreds and eventually in the thousands. So before i start, let me first make sure that my clicker works. Hey there we go. Is there a way to make that full screen? So this is jerry.
The bear he’s a totally interactive learning tool for young children who are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and for those of you who don’t know being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a child. Fundamentally, changes your life all of a sudden at the age of 3, you have to prick your fingers upwards of five times a day, take an insulin injection along with every meal and count every single carbohydrate that enters your body, and this is made worse by the Fact that these children are not actually allowed to practice their own medical procedures, so they’re they’re really left in the dark, and what jerry is is he’s a best friend for these kids. They can check his glucose levels by squeezing his fingers great jerry’s, feeling awesome.
You can feed him different foods that he comes with in his backpack just by swiping them over his mouth, and you can give him insulin by tapping his pen over his injection sites and the real magic happens through a series of animated story books where kids train Jerry for the olympic games – and this is really where they get to latch on to these learnings and where they get to accelerate towards disease mastery. So we’re thrilled that last christmas, we were actually able to ship these guys out and we reached two percent of children who were newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. And this was by far the most exciting and powerful milestone for me, because we actually got to see the reactions of having these guys in people’s homes for a prolonged period of time and and here’s just one short reaction that we actually caught on video of the Unboxing experience, which uh is my favorite, so this is this is where we are now and what i’d like to do is kind of take a walk through the rather precarious process of what it took to get here so uh, all throughout figuring out how we were Gon na go and and manufacture jerry, our guiding principle was: how can we optimize what we’re doing for what is best for our business? So when we started out, we were in phase one doing one-off prototypes, improving the concept. This was actually a photo of our first prototype. It’S really really rough around the edges. It actually scared a lot of kids.
Those eyes were hacked out of a furby, the the bear blinked. What you can’t tell from this photo is that that little girl’s arm is actually what’s holding the bear’s head onto its body. It’S attached with little metal nails around its neck. You know to the stapling the fur uh from its head to its chest, and so we went through a couple of iterations like this uh each one off testing a different feature and functionality.
So we’d make a bear. We test it with 10 kids we’d make another. Bear we test it with even more kids and – and we really built this until we got to one model – that we really liked that model on the far right. And then we were in this phase where we wanted to test the features and the functionalities we felt as though we had the form down.
The concept was proven. Kids really really liked these bears, and so what we did is i call this. The pizza and beer phase i’m gluten free, so this is the ribs and cider phase for me, and so we got a bunch of friends together and we started hacking away. So we had picked a design. We had 3d printed casings. We made these really neat flexible circuit button pads to assemble into these 3d printing casings, and this kind of speaks to the fact of optimizing.
What’S the best for our business, this is certainly not the cost-effective way to do things. Those button pads were three hundred dollars and at the time those casings cost us ninety dollars to make, but the most valuable thing that our business needed at that point was to test with users and was to get feedback. So this is what was necessity in that phase for us and what we did is we took these 10 bears and we went to a conference and tested with over 200 kids with type 1 diabetes, and that was in immense learning. For us, the biggest takeaway here was that, while children engaged with the with the mere aspects of taking care of jerry, what was truly important was a story.
The fact that these children knew where jerry came from knew why they had to take care of him and knew how he was going to help them get to this place, where they were comfortable with their own disease and so coming out of this testing experience. We were still about a team of two people at that time, and this was kind of the part where we said okay, so we have something that works now. How do we take it from 10 units to a thousand units? How do we scale and everybody around us the kind of uh, this unified theme which actually uh this the speaker before me i had mentioned as well – was: okay, we should go to china. So great pack up my bags uh get a bunch of bears uh wrapped up in my suitcase.
They look like this. They all made a lot of friends on that 12-hour flight and and flew down to china to meet with factories that could encompass those three things that i skipped through really quickly earlier, which was plush, electronics and plastics. So this led us to a lot of toy factories, and these things are santa’s workshop on a massive scale. You know you have people who are manually stuffing all of these thousands of little stuffed animals uh, sewing and assembling at a scale that actually looks rather creepy. To me, this was one of the rooms i walked into, and i i was taken aback for a little bit to look like the set of a movie, and what we quickly started to learn was that we were not at the phase where we could yet go And approach these larger contract manufacturers and from everything we’ve heard earlier – this is nothing new. This is no surprise but to us two bright-eyed and bushy-style tailed folks, right out of college this. This was a surprise, and so luckily we found an electronics factory who was really excited about working with us, they’re a factory called aqs and actually have dual manufacturing capabilities in the us and in china, and so that seemed like a great option but came back so Check got one got one of the three, so it came back to to to home base said okay. Now we kind of got to refactor the plan.
What are we going to do? How are we going to meet the deadline which was set out before us, which was how do we get? These bears into the hands of kids for the holidays for christmas and hanukkah, so we looked locally and we realized our strengths. We didn’t have the purchasing powers of large companies right, we couldn’t negotiate and really drive down our bill of materials, but what we did have was relationships and we did have a network of experts that we had built locally, and that was one of the most important Things for us, and so we looked to the states and actually took to one of the oldest tools uh in the business, which is the thomas register. I don’t know if anybody here has used it. My dad started an oil paint business when he was in college and he found all of his pigment suppliers in the thomas register, who knew – and so i searched in the first thing to find, which was the most difficult was a plush factory.
Now, for those of you that don’t know which was myself, there are only two plush factories in the entire us. One is down in north carolina and one is over in phoenix arizona. So i booked a plane ticket down to big plush and i arrived to this scene.
What you can’t tell from this image is that that bear is five feet. Tall apparently big plush makes stuffed animals that are your standard, bear sheep’s lines and goats, but in sizes no smaller than five feet, so that left us with limited options. So we traveled over to stuffington bear factory which luckily was an incredible partner and was very very excited about what we were doing. So this was uh kind of that third piece. Second piece of the puzzle – and these are just some of the really cool folks – that we work with down there uh so electronics check plus check plastics where to go, and this is where we really dived.
In locally we went hyper local, so we we’re from providence, rhode, island uh me me and jerry, and we work with a local cnc shop, which is really cool, they’re, actually all-purpose, run by an incredibly neat designer. So this is kind of a look inside of the space and in the spirit of rhode, island. Everybody knows a guy, and this guy knew a guy and that guy happened to own an injection molding factory, and this kind of goes to this when you’re doing things in small quantities, when you’re building runs in the hundreds, you often have to do a lot of Things yourself that otherwise your factory would typically have to do, and for us this meant building our own injection molds, which was for the mechanical engineer in me. The most exciting thing i could possibly do – and it taught me a ton about the process becoming entrenched in this, so these are just a couple of progress shots. These are inserts for the injection mold. These are the inserts for the inserts, and these are just some of the local folks that we worked with. This is giovanni. This is kind of all of our molds laid out, and – and this is where i really started to learn, so i designed this press-fit part.
It’S jerry’s food disk. It has press-fit little holes all around the rim that make sure that these two things snap together. What i didn’t realize is that behind every press, fit behind every circular hole is a pin and in order to insert a pin into a mold blank, you have to drill a hole and in a mold set up like this. You have 44 holes in your insert in the insert to the insert and in the insert to the insert to the insert, which meant a lot of holes and that somebody who was really angry at me when they had to drill all of these holes.
So that was one of a really interesting takeaway about truly immersing ourselves in the process. This is us fitting that final mold, together and kind of that joy in rejoicing that all of these pins did not bind and that the mold in fact locked and this kind of uh then leads us to the actual race to shipment and fulfillment. So, while electronics were underway being made in china and while plushes were being assembled in phoenix arizona, i was over in province, rhode island with the rest of my team, fervently injection molding literally days before our ship date to meet these bears getting out in time. For christmas and assembling the plastics and this kind of spoke to the real value of building these relationships uh we met this man victor rouhani. I call him an american hero without uh. This guy he’s the the fellow who owns the injection molding factory.
We would not have been able to ship these bears in time. For christmas. I was with victor on thanksgiving morning running his machines uh and he was gracious enough uh. He he didn’t mind.
He said he didn’t want to be home as everybody was cooking. So maybe i did him a favor um, but this was incredible and and not only that this kind of led to us then being able to borrow a machine from him, lift it onto the back of a truck so that we can actually ultrasonic weld our parts Together and borrowing his expertise to then design the ultrasonic welding horn and see and see it with days left in our timeline to actually ship these bears out. So what this really culminated in is that most exciting moment for me, which was having those children unbox. Those bears at christmas time and now being able to get in all of the incredible reactions, feedback and responses that we’ve been getting from our families and now, all throughout this process of designing jerry. All we did was really go back to the user and once we’ve shipped products, it’s really the same. Our customer support is really continued user research. Every time we get a phone call that something might not work just right. That’S an opportunity to learn to iterate, to refine the product and becoming engrossed in all aspects of this manufacturing process enabled us to learn not only how to be better product designers, how to be better engineers, but how to learn those intimate details about how our product Is assembled, what areas can we improve? Can we optimize and what kind of lies in the future for us? Is this next step of scaling? Oh and actually so this is something we felt it really powerful that, since everybody, along in our supply chain, knew that this product was going to impact kids, we actually had them all sign a handwritten.
Thank you note that went in every box, and this was just one of those really heartwarming things that every family who received a bear knew that it was handmade and knew that it was handmade for their child. So that kind of goes through uh. That aspect of building this this supply chain built on relationships built on people who truly understand the product and now as we’re scaling, and we want to keep that that same supply chain we’re in this phase of what’s next. How do we keep on doing this uh? But how do we transition from hundreds to thousands and for us it goes back to the thing that i mentioned at the beginning, realize your strengths. We are not tablet manufacturers and what we actually designed in jerry is a full-blown android tablet with sensors that all plug into it. It’S all custom, and while that was necessary and critical for us to get a product out the door quickly.
That’S not our core capacity and so we’re actually partnering with a tablet manufacturer to white label existing tablets and incorporate them into our product to still keep this same supply chain but beginning to optimize elements of it. To streamline that process and to bring us closer and closer to being able to ramp up efficiently and effectively, so i really hope that there were some important takeaways for those entrepreneurs in the room or those makers that might be starting this process. You know for us this uh from first saying: hey we’re going to go from these one-off prototypes to hey now we’re going to figure out how to ship. This was about a year-long process and it was day in day out of failure, iteration, refactoring and refiguring, and there is no golden bullet.
This is what worked for us, but there are infinite ways to figure out how to manufacture your product and it’s really dependent on. What’S the best for you who are your users, how many? How what are the volumes that you’re starting with and what you know, how much funding do you have in the bank? All of these things play and play into those roles? So if you have any questions, please email me afterwards or come find me i’d love to share more about my experience and even give you a demo of jerry. So thank you. You .