Do you have difficulty storing enough beer bottles in your fridge? The so-called beer-ends – ‘bookend for your beer’ – might be the thing for you.
Zac Martin, an advertising professional betting on the Aussie’s love for beer and the fridge’s unfriendly disposition to bottles, has just set out to raise $17,500 on the crowdfunding site Pozible in order to commercially make these beer-ends that help stack more beer bottles in a fridge.
He’s found 83 backers who have pledged $3,697 but under the funding rules, it’s all-or-nothing. Unless the pledges hit the targeted amount in 30 days – before 16 May – Martin could end up with nothing to “kickstart the manufacturing process.”
People who pledge receive various rewards ranging from a single beerend to packages including a Two Birds Brewing tee. If you want to back this project, click here.
It’s not rocket science
Now some of you might wonder if storing beer bottles in a fridge is really that difficult?
The shelves are too small to stand bottles up, and laying them down takes up too much room, and if you try and stack them on top of each other the pyramid crumbles pretty quickly, says Martin.
“The product comes out of need, and I believe consumers are willing to pay for something if it fixes a problem,” Martin told Anthill.
Still, Martin was stuck for months together, apparently unwilling to act.
“I’d been kicking around the idea for six months before a colleague basically told me to shut up, stop talking about it and actually go down to Bunnings, buy some tools and just build a rough prototype,” he confessed.
Martin then put a “poorly cut prototype” into the fridge and it actually worked. “That was my Eureka moment, when I realised the idea could actually become a product,” he exclaimed. His working prototype, made of ABS plastic with a chrome finish, works only in fridges with wire-style shelves. But if his crowdfunding campaign is successful, he plans to design another that will work on glass or flat plastic shelves.
Martin says he chose the crowdfunding route because there is only a “small risk attached.” He believes it’s also an “exercise in market research – I know if the campaign is unsuccessful then it’s probably not worth pursuing and I haven’t wasted too much time or money on the concept.”
With a double degree in Bachelor of Business (Management/Marketing), Martin has worked as a digital strategist at CumminsRoss and previously worked at George Patterson Y&R. Not really. His only previous entrepreneurial experience was building and selling a small website.