Necessity
IS the mother of invention…
People ask me how I come up with the ideas for things I am working on.
With regard for the idea and design for StopTraxTM
I must admit that I didn’t really have a
choice!. In the spring of 1998 I purchased my first
home. Then I got a kitten for my first home. Then I
became very, very busy with a consulting assignment. At
about the beginning of September things started to calm
down and I finally had time to do spring-cleaning. I was
shocked and dismayed to find that there was cat litter
tracked all over the kitchen and most of the downstairs.
I had purchased a number of products that claim to
eliminate tracked cat litter. All of the products that I
could find barely worked for a day or two before they
had to be emptied or cleaned, making them high
maintenance and thus useless. Finally in desperation I
started to design a device that would solve the problem
of tracked cat litter once and for all!
Function
follows form…
I knew that I
needed to keep the cat from stepping on the litter he
had already tracked from the cat litter box. My initial
idea was something like a window screen that the cat
would walk across. The cat litter would fall through the
screen or grid and land in some sort of tray, which
would then be periodically emptied (weekly or even
monthly). The first prototype was two feet wide and four
feet long and about six inches tall. Once I found out
this actually worked I figured I would just sell the
idea and pay my student loans…
What's
an idea worth?
The easy answer
is "as much as you can get for it". Finding
the real value is quite another matter. It depends on a
number of different factors, which include production
cost, total market volume, expected market penetration
and price point. By the way, the list goes on. After
some research on the web and getting some pet industry
statistics, it occurred to me that this was a project
that I wanted to keep. Pre-production samples were
designed and ordered. Patents were filed. A name was
chosen. Web sites and 800 numbers were acquired. The
market was segmented and a market strategy was
developed. Packaging was designed. Finally, with mostly
everything in place we were ready to visit the pet
stores.
Better
by design…
Why? Because At
KittyMaidTM our primary concern is not
price-point or shelf space in the supermarket. This
product was designed to stop tracking cat litter by a
cat owner who wanted a low maintenance, easy to use
product to virtually eliminate tracked cat litter for
good ! |
www.terrificpets.com
View our pet store for thousands of pet supply products.
 
http://www.hotdiggidydog.co.uk
|
