Voltaire: a portable, high-performance coffee grinder that monitors bean freshness. Ever Cup: a sustainable travel mug for coffee+tea.
Hope all you Ever Cup backers received our postcard in the mail - we're thinking of you!
Merry Christmas and cozy greetings from the GIR Team! Voltaire and Ever Cup are right around the corner.
Cheers,
Sam, Christian, Brian, Mike, and Sally
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Brian and Sam spent the week at the Smart Kitchen Summit in Seattle, where Voltaire was a finalist in their Startup Showcase.
We didn’t win (need a fig-flavored caviar 3D food printer? Because the judges did!), but we met a lot of wonderful people and saw some fairly amazing new food tech. The future looks delicious.
Also, Scott Heimendinger (who helped us prototype the original Sensing Platform for detecting bean freshness) gave us a tour of the Modernist Cuisine Laboratory. Mind. Blown. The MC team is working on their next book, Modernist Bread, and boy did it smell good in that kitchen!
On the production and product development fronts, we have great news to share. It’s been two months since the campaign ended, and we were very busy doing what we do best: making stuff real.
The Ever Cup is in production! We locked in final branding elements a couple weeks ago and started tooling. Here are a few snapshots of the logo and other elements, which we tried to apply in a way that remains faithful to the streamlined elegance the Ever Cup embodies.
Once tooling finishes in a couple weeks, we’ll start production testing and have lots of photos to share!
Voltaire got some upgrades, too. We finalized our electronics package, including the PCB design and Gerber files, and made improvements to the LED light pipe that illuminates the digital timer. We also upgraded Voltaire’s battery pack to provide additional voltage to the burr motor, which allowed us to make a substantial positive increase in grind fineness and consistency. Voltaire’s upper grind limit can output something as fine and soft as baby powder now, while keeping the lower limit stable at a consistency that would be great for spices or bbq rubs.
We have a long way to go with Voltaire overall, but tooling isn’t far off and our March delivery date is holding firm so far.
The biggest challenge ahead of us is software development for the Sensing Platform. It’s one thing to have the hardware all set… but software dev is a whole other beast. Hope to have lots to share on that in the next couple months as we really ramp up and refocus from the hardware side of things.
On a final note, we’re launching another Kickstarter campaign on Monday! We’ve had GIR Bottle Stoppers in the works for about a year now (labor of love), and produced a small test run for pre-ordering a few months ago.
They got great reviews, so we’re ready for a full production run and plan to deliver them (along with your Ever Cups - don’t worry) in time for the holidays! They are eye-catching, inexpensive, and REALLY good at keeping stuff inside a bottle. We’ll send a link to the live campaign as soon as we launch!
Cheers,
The GIR Team