How Two Aussies Got Their Gadget Idea Funded By Kickstarter

This isn’t your average story about yet another iPhone case. This is about how two blokes from Melbourne got their quirky idea funded by the world – through Kickstarter, the idea incubator and crowd-funding site. They took their concept from piss talk to reality, and there’s nothing stopping you from doing the same.

Australians like to drink. A lot. So why not build a bottle opener into an iPhone case? That’s what got Chris Peters (an industrial designer) and Rob Ward (tool maker and plastic injection moulds) thinking. Last week their idea, which we first previewed in June, reached over 100 per cent of their $15,000 target funding on Kickstarter. With two days left, they have almost $19,000 from 400 backers. I asked how they heard about the site:

“Kickstarter was first brought to our attention via the huge success of the Tick-Tock iPod Nano Watch project. We loved the concept of crowd funding and knew we just had to run our own project to see how the process worked. We’re both big fans of Apple products and had seen that accessories for their products had a high success rate on Kickstarter so we thought it would be a good fit.

We started designing the Opena a few months before we launched the project on Kickstarter as we had to get the design right and make sure it worked. We had a prototype made, tested it, tweaked the CAD and made a new prototype. This process went through a few cyles until we were happy with the end result. ”

How long until drinkers can buy the Opena?

Once our funding period is complete it then takes 2-3 weeks for the payments to be processed and then released from Kickstarter. Because we’ve already hit out funding goal (last week) we were able to place an order for the production tooling and get things moving before the Kickstarter funding was complete. This has allowed us to speed things up, and fingers crossed we’ll be shipping out the first production Opena’s to all our great backers in late August.

But if you miss out, don’t stress as we’ll be taking pre-orders through our website at openacase.com once the Kickstarter project finishes at the RRP of $40.

Thanks to Chris and Rob for their time. So how about it Giz… what’s your big idea?