#HTE
This Kickstarter Hit Finds a Way to Unlock a Whole New Coffee Market
On Kickstarter, it feels as if designers are constantly coming up with new ways to redesign a device to brew your coffee or a product in which you can enjoy your beverage. In a world rife with likely unnecessary coffee products, it’s hard to imagine something that actually creates new demand for a product that is both novel and useful. But as shown by the smashing success that is IA Collaborative’s Kelvin coffee roaster, the need for a product that helps the everyday consumers roast their own coffee beans proves to be in very high demand.
What are the benefits of roasting your own coffee at home, you might ask? For one, the optimal time to enjoy the flavor of the coffee bean is when they’re freshly roasted. That means when you buy those big bags of coffee, it’s likely the beans are stale, as they only stay fresh for about 3-4 days after roasting.
Secondly, premium unroasted coffee beans are well under the $15-$20 price you would pay for a premium roasted bag (unroasted beans normally go for about $5 to $7 a bag). A product like Kelvin combines both the opportunity for optimal flavor and notable yearly savings.
When it came to the possibility of roasting coffee at home, one person at IA Collaborative highlighted a serious lack in availability, as AI Collaborative Founder and Chief Design Officer Dan Kraemer noted: “an architect who works with us pitched this idea of home roasted coffee. He has a buddy who home roasts his own coffee, I think he uses a hot air popcorn maker, which believe me, is not ideal."
After digging into some research, they noticed a few things. There’s a niche market of consumers with a serious dedication to excellent coffee, but there are several suspect products and methods for roasting beans at home that hardly promise consistent results. There’s also the fact that the pathway to ordering your own raw green coffee beans is incredibly confusing and obtuse. So with Kelvin, they designed both a product that roasts your beans as well as an app that allows you to easily order green beans according to your preferences.
IA Collaborative believes the app gives Kelvin the utility of both a product and a service and is where they are creating new demand. Normally to buy raw beans, Kraemer noted that "you have to search these websites that don’t explain exactly what you’re buying.” Kelvin’s app gives you more information about the beans you order and some suggested roast times, which they hope encourages people to learn more about the art of coffee roasting. “We’re looking at coffee making as more of a culinary experience,” says IA Collaborative Design Engineering Director Luke Westra, “you are taking this food product and you’re cooking it, releasing aromatics and oils, so we’re excited to show people that journey and have people engage in what for a very long time was a very functional beverage."
Kelvin takes less than 10 minutes to roast your coffee beans and allows for endless experimentation: "once you experiment, you could get 500 different variations,” says Kraemer, “flavor can change by the second.” In addition to a sleek look, Kelvin also has double-wall construction so it remains cool to the touch, an auto-cool down function to ensure the roast of the bean is exactly to your liking, and it collects coffee bean skins for easy disposal.
IA Collaborative is of course known for initiating a long overdue re-release of Henry Dreyfuss’s Humanscale manual, which they noted was of great help to them in the process of developing Kelvin: “referencing Humanscale for Kelvin, we asked what’s the optimal diameter of this front handle? And the affordance here so you can pull it out easily? It even has strength, like what’s the maximum the thing should weigh in order for an average adult female to pick it up.” To develop both the product and the app, they also worked intimately with a number of craft roasters who would give feedback on the flavor of the beans roasted on their working prototype and they helped to develop a collection of beans to make available on the app that would be best utilized in a home roasting environment.
All in all, IA Collaborative used their extensive experience in product development with their clients to ensure they were creating a product that felt intuitive, ergonomic, and perhaps most importantly, was a more essential addition to the growing coffee industry than just another french press or coffee machine. As of the time this article was published, Kelvin was well over its $40,000 goal clocking in at $243,414 with more than 30 days left to go—so as it seems, products like Kelvin have promising potential to dominate their very own sector of the coffee industry by putting the power of coffee roasting into the hands of the consumer.
http://www.core77.com/posts/76809/This-Kickstarter-Hit-Finds-a-Way-to-Unlock-a-Whole-New-Coffee-Market