Yak About It

I thought of the idea while entertaining friends.  The process to make specialty cocktails was problematic.  First, using the dish was messy and wasteful.  We always threw out a lot of salt/sugar at the end of the night and our kitchen counter and floor always had salt all over the place.  Second, because we were serving several types of cocktails (i.e. lemon drop martinis with sugar and margaritas with salt), we had to have several plates with the salt / sugar etc.  Third, often times, someone would get half-way through their drink and they wanted to add more salt or sugar to the rim because they ran out, there was no way to do this.  Individually these challenges were really just minor inconveniences.  But when combined, the challenges were significant enough to tackle.

While Tim was in business school at MIT, he took a product design and development class and this is where the true development really began.  We began putting together some rudimentary prototypes and worked on this part time while working in our “regular” full time jobs.   During this time, we worked on patents, market research, manufacturing possibilities, funding options … and many, many prototypes.  It turns out that affixing a solid to the rim of a glass in an upright position is no easy feat.  Though The Barmaid may look like a simple device, there is a significant amount of engineering that has gone into it.    

I had the idea for the brella bag many years ago when my son was young and I got tired of having to plan my day around the weather. It took me years to make a prototype that worked the way I wanted it to. I got a patent on the brella bag about 5 years ago.