THE GENIUS CONTRAPTION THAT WILL MAKE YOUR FLIGHT SUCK LESS
IT’S A RARE and beautiful thing when a Kickstarter seedling blossoms into an real product, and all the more so when it’s one that could make a meaningful impact on your life. Or at least, the part of it you spend inside and airplane.
The premise behind Craig Rabin’s Airhook sounds, appropriately enough, like something out of SkyMall: a cupholder that mounts to your upright tray, that can also hold your tablet or smartphone at eye-level so that you can customize your in-flight entertainment. And like all great inventions, it was mothered by necessity—or at least, inconvenience.
“I was flying from Seattle to San Francisco basically just for lunch, so it was the only time I’d ever worn a sport coat on an airplane,” recalls Rabin, who was working as a “virtual events consultant” at the time. “I figured I had three options: Ask if they have room to hang it, let it get horribly wrinkled in the overhead, or I wear it and I’m just sweating buckets by the time we land.”
There was no room to hang it. The overheads were full. Sweating it out wasn’t acceptable. So Rabin spent the flight with jacket draped over lap, staring at the tray table in front of him, dreaming of a better way.
The Fourth Option
What Rabin came up with was a simple hook that would connect to a tray table, something he could 3D print at home. Specifically, something he could 3D print many versions of, in enough shapes and sizes to withstand significant trial and error. “I’m not a designer,” Rabin explains, “so I was making this incredibly easy stuff.” The only spec sheet he had to work with was his own guesstimation.
“I 3D-printed a bunch of options, figuring some won’t fit; I didn’t know sizing,” says Rabin. “One of them happened to work.”
On his next flight, that initial prototype resulted in airborne bliss—a free lap, an unwrinkled jacket—right up until the drink cart came around. With nowhere to put his coffee, Rabin packed up his hook, unlocked and unfolded his tray, placed his jacket gently back on his lap, and went back to the printing board.
Nine major redesigns later, the Airhook is in its final, retail-ready iteration. It’s still incredibly simple: A hole for a cup, an adjustable clasp to keep a phone or tablet in place. Other refinements, like the ability to adjust the angle in case the seat in front of you decides to recline, haven’t strayed from the core value proposition. “As long as my tray table’s going to be up,” Rabin explains, “it’s got to have all of the same value as the tray table, and that’s holding your drink and watching your electronics device.”
The headaches this saves you, after a quick initial set-up, are manifold. No more fumbling with the tray, or trying to keep your drink from sliding around it. No more hard, wasted taps on the non-responsive built-in video display. No more hunchback-inducing neck-craning to watch the screen you brought with you instead, or spending $6 to watch a movie you could rent on your iPad for half as much. There are a handful of limitations as well: It won’t work in a bulkhead or exit row seat, and support for cans and mini-bottles of wine is in the works but not yet complete.
Otherwise, though, it should work as advertised regardless of the size of the tray table you’re trying to encounter, and whether the seat has a built-in entertainment system or not. Even more appealing? Unlike so many other promising Kickstarters that never cleared the runway, the Airhook appears destined for clear blue skies.
Kickstart Success
The list of Kickstarter disappointments is by now longer than the crowdfunding site’s greatest hits. Too often, well-intentioned inventors disappear when their dreams run into the various roadblocks thrown up by reality.
Rabin fears no such outcome, in part because he didn’t really need Kickstarter’s money to begin with. “We used Kickstarter more as a marketing and consumer validation than crowdfunding. A lot of people get that wrong, and look at Kickstarter as a strictly crowdfunding venue.” By contrast, Rabin already had capital in place. He’d done market research, gone through several rounds of prototyping, and even had pre-purchase orders, all before the Kickstarter ever launched this June.
Rabin had also, crucially, made sure to address the aspect of bringing a new idea to life that ruined so many other promising campaigns: actually producing them at scale. And he did it the smartest way possible. He asked for help.
“I know nothing about manufacturing,” says Rabin. “So instead of trying to make it about myself, we hired a manufacturing consultant that’s had eight years of working with the same contract manufacturers. That’s getting us well above the initial learning curve for people who try to do it on their own, that leads to those horrible, horrible horror strategies… Our best strategy was to hire someone smarter than we were.”
There’s still plenty of time for things to go wrong; production doesn’t go off until October, according to a schedule publicized by Airhook, and orders are mounting. Around 3200 units through the Kickstarter campaign alone, with an additional 400 through the normal pre-order site as of this writing (that’s about two days’ worth). Rabin says they’re selling an average of “70 to 150 units per day” through the online shop, which even at the low end means adds thousands of Airhooks a month to that first production run.
Those numbers sound daunting until Rabin puts them in perspective. “At this point, today, we can produce 1,500 Airhooks a day,” he says reassuringly, “and that’s just with a single-cavity tool.”
Barring a sudden Airhook-frenzied mob, or a bulk corporate order large enough to prompt some rethinking, they’re more than prepared to meet demand in December with minimal turbulence.
Until then, the next time you find yourself trapped beneath a tray table that makes coach somehow even more claustrophobic—or crowdfunding a dream without any real sense of how to actually produce it—Airhook’s a great reminder that there’s always a better way.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered