Did you have a lightbulb moment?
I made my kids wooden wands when the first Harry Potter film came out and thought that a simple paper wand, which looked like wood and was easy to make, would be a great new project for my website [creative ideas and craft projects aimed at dads]. The project took a month to think up, but was an instant success and was downloaded over 500,000 times, proving beyond a doubt that wands were popular.
Co-founder Richard Blakesley and I had both been founders of a venture capital-funded startup that had developed displays for remote controls and I thought it would be a good idea to have a remote control wand. When I chatted to Richard about the issues of hiding the buttons, he suggested that the wand could be gesture-based using a miniature accelerometer that was becoming commonplace in mobile phones. To me, that was the lightbulb moment.
What was the most difficult thing about starting your business?
Raising the finance to pay for the tooling and place the first stock order. Richard and I discovered that we covered all the important functions needed to get a company started, develop a product and bring it to market. Without any external help we were able to take the wand right the way through from first concept to finished working product. We also had a good relationship with a factory that could manufacture the product for us, but we needed money to pay for tooling and the first production run.
From our experience in dealing with venture capitalists we thought that getting the finance for such a strong idea would be easy, but in the difficult business climate of 2009, getting anyone to put the money up proved to be impossible. In the end we put a proposition to a number of our friends and family members and with our own savings managed to get just enough money to start.
Talk us through your daily routine
Richard and I are very lucky to be able to work from our respective homes. People ask us if we have trouble concentrating, but actually we have to make sure that we each stop at a decent hour.
My background is as a designer and an engineer, so depending on the stage of any given product development, I could be meticulously going through an engineering design with Richard on Skype using shared documents in Google Docs, or taking photos for our product shots and marketing material.
If we are nearing the end of the mechanical design stage of a product, then I will naturally be spending most of my time writing and illustrating the manual and designing the packaging, while Richard finishes the electronics design and writes the software needed to make our products work.
What motivates you to succeed?
Two things: the overpowering urge to invent, and the worry that I won’t have enough money to pay the bills and support my family. If I was sure that I had enough wealth to support my family, then I would still continue to invent, build and make things, but they probably wouldn’t be that commercial.
How have your products evolved since their earliest prototypes?
I am lucky in that I can envisage a product as pretty much fully formed. Once I have designed it in my head, all that remains is to let it out, so to speak. However, Richard and I put so much into our products, that as the development process goes through its various stages both of us will think of lovely little details or nice touches that we can add to the product to make it even better.
Do you have a favourite product from your range?
Our range is very small, as we have only had the time and resources to develop one product each year. I love the product that we are working on right now and I would say that although the wand has a big place in my heart as a life-changing product for me, the current product we are developing, a Star Trek Phaser universal remote control prop replica, is the most exciting thing I have ever worked on.
I am a keen Star Trek fan – 20 years ago, I even wrote and submitted a script for Star Trek – so for me working on this new product is a dream come true.
Do you have any advice for achieving a good work-life balance?
Love what you do and make sure you make time for the people who love you. And make sure you surround yourself with people that actually support you and want you to succeed. That part is much easier said than done, but is critical to any entrepreneur.
They say wands are only as powerful as the wizards who use them. If you could have any super power, what would it be and why?
For me, the answer is simple – I’d be indestructible. I am the eldest child of six in my family and I have a strong feeling of having to provide and protect my family. If I was indestructible, then I wouldn’t have to worry so much about being able to do that properly.
Chris Barnardo is the co-founder of The Wand Company.
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