The truth is: Hopscotch was born of pure necessity. You see at Lollygig, we depend on our smart phones (perhaps a little too much), but we’re terrible at remembering where our phones are. And we’ve definitely lost our keys a few too many times. As we observed our own actions and watched others experience the same exasperating problem – searching endlessly (and needlessly!) for their phones and keys, we had an “aha” moment. What if our phones and keys had one convenient location to rest wherever we went – in our homes, offices, and even our cars?
A quick mockup in Rhino and a 3D-print later, and we arrived at an early working proof of concept, which was absolutely thrilling. The initial design included only a phone mount, and it would require many iterations more to arrive at an elegant and integration key mount solution. We explored solutions a broad array of ideas to solve this unnecessarily annoying problem. So we designed one mount, and then another.
We distributed a few early prototypes to friends and family. Soon we had enough positive feedback to put some serious effort behind this little project. It seemed that we were on to something. We played around with a variety of features, aesthetic choices and colors. In the end, we chose to borrow from Apple’s design cues, choosing to exaggerate certain elements at times. The radius of the corners mattered immensely, and we chose to emphasize a nice big chamfer to complement Apple’s subtle edge on the iPhone 5 and 5S. Precise engineering and design required Lollygig to switch to SolidWorks – parametric CAD software capable of handling minute adjustments and design for injection molding.
In earlier projects Lollygig had bootstrapped its concepts – self-funding earlier apps and physical products. This time we were determined to crowdfund the product on Kickstarter. The platform empowered us to create a focused campaign to reach an audience of people primed to support creatives (and a lot of iPhone lovers). Prepping the project for launch required us to have every aspect of the project dialed in – including design-for-manufacturing, injection molding, and logistics, and even the marketing and social media campaign dialed in. In fact we built an entirely new sub-brand called Hopscotch to give the project its own identity.
After our successful Kickstarter campaign ended, we then built an e-commerce site to host ongoing sales requests for the new brand.
