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`Why That Phone Charger Took Two Years to Arrive The New York Times
`
`Why That Phone Charger Took Two Years
`to Arrive
`
`By Jenna Wortham(cid:0) June 14, 2014 9:00 am
`
`I first heard about the JuiceTank, a slim iPhone case that doubles as a wall
`charger, when my friends started raving about it two years ago on Twitter.
`There was one catch, though it didn’t bother them: The JuiceTank didn’t yet
`exist.
`
`It was the brainchild of two guys at a startup company who were seeking
`money via Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site. My curiosity was piqued, too, so
`I paid $55 in March 2012 to help bring the gadget into the world. My money
`was a “preorder,” and my own JuiceTank was slated for delivery a few months
`later.
`
`For a while, I eagerly awaited the arrival of my spiffy new charger, but as
`time passed — a lot of time — I managed to do without it. Then, a few months
`ago, I became determined to find out what had happened to my order and to
`my money. So I sent a polite email to the support team, which replied that my
`JuiceTank had actually been delivered some months earlier, but to an old
`address. The team offered to send a replacement.
`
`I had another idea, though: I identified myself as a reporter and asked to
`be put in touch with the creators of the JuiceTank, so I could learn what had
`gone awry.
`
`A few days later, I was shaking hands with Lloyd Gladstone and Jesse
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`http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/14/whythatphonechargertooktwoyearstoarrive/?_r=1
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`Pliner, the pair behind the product, in their offices in downtown Manhattan.
`Both were eager to walk me through the series of errors and glitches that they
`encountered as they began to transform their idea into a business two years
`ago.
`
`“Everything that could go wrong went wrong,” said Mr. Gladstone,
`including their choice of the name, JuiceTank, which another company was
`already using.
`
`Eventually, they changed their product’s name to the Prong — but the
`nomenclature snag was only a taste of the hassles ahead.
`
`Designing and fabricating a basic prototype was much harder than they
`had expected, and they spoke wearily of the process of obtaining permission
`from Apple to sell the case as a licensed accessory. They were required to work
`with a small number of preapproved factories, so the men traveled to and from
`China to negotiate a manufacturing deal and to oversee production.
`
`At the time, Mr. Pliner, who worked in finance, and Mr. Gladstone, who
`was studying to become a lawyer, were truly just starting up: They had no
`prior experience with products or manufacturing.
`
`“We were learning everything on the fly,” Mr. Pliner said. They kept
`pushing back the date for shipping, leaving their customers — like me —
`waiting.
`
`“We kept making promises and failing to deliver,” Mr. Gladstone said.
`“There was a point where people started to wonder if it was a scam.”
`
`Although they had raised $130,000 through Kickstarter, they burned
`through the sum rather quickly. It wasn’t enough to finance their early costs,
`so they raised additional money privately. Finally, they began shipping iPhone
`cases in December 2013 — nearly a year after they had originally promised to
`deliver them — and immediately hit another speed bump: Their case no longer
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`seemed cuttingedge. By then, sleek and inexpensive cases that doubled as
`battery chargers from companies like Mophie and Lenmar were flooding the
`market. “The technology caught up with what we were offering,” Mr.
`Gladstone said. They needed to develop a secondgeneration version of their
`product.
`
`They are now doing so — with the PWR Case, which offers a detachable
`backup battery. And this time around, the company has the benefit of
`experience: It now has 15 employees, and has already sold thousands of the
`original product. Its creators are using capital they have already raised, and
`say they have a deal with Best Buy to distribute their updated cases, which,
`they say, will go on sale this summer.
`
`While they made plenty of mistakes, they say they were lucky to have
`begun with Kickstarter, which generated interest and funding for a project that
`might not have survived otherwise. Kickstarter, they said, gave them a much
`needed stamp of credibility and a core audience, which they plan to leverage
`for future products.
`
`There have been real success stories on Kickstarter, and I’ve enjoyed
`watching some of them take off: products like the Pebble smartwatch, the
`party game Cards Against Humanity and the virtualreality headset called the
`Oculus Rift. (Facebook announced in March that it was buying the company
`that makes the headset, for $2 billion.)
`
`It was the buzz emanating from Kickstarter that led me to help fund the
`JuiceTank in the first place. The idea of helping two ambitious inventors
`experiment with a product appealed to me, as did the thought that I would
`own a funky new case that few people had.
`
`Yet all those months of waiting cooled some of my initial excitement about
`crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, a similar site. I used to peruse
`them relentlessly, looking for neat projects like photography books, indie
`magazines and movies that I could put a few dollars toward. But I have not
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`pledged money in any crowdfunding campaigns since late last year.
`
`Despite the help from Kickstarter, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Pliner said they
`weren’t likely to use it or any other crowdfunding site to raise money in the
`future. One reason is that they no longer need to go that route; Now that
`they’re experienced, they said, they should be able to attract more capital
`through direct investment if needed.
`
`A problem with Kickstarter projects a couple of years ago, they said, was
`that people who backed them might not have understood that they might be
`funding ideas that hadn’t yet been developed or manufactured. In 2012
`Kickstarter began to require that hardware projects on the site show
`prototypes to reduce the chance of twoyear delivery lags like the one I
`experienced.
`
`Still, Kickstarter and other sites, like Indiegogo, view themselves as
`project enablers, not as guarantors. They say they aren’t responsible if a
`project doesn’t deliver.
`
`“We can’t force anyone to do anything,” said Slava Rubin, one of the
`founders and the C.E.O. of Indiegogo. “If someone wants to fund something,
`they should make an informed decision before doing it.”
`
`In my case, I believe that I did that. In the end, I’ve got an extra iPhone
`charging case, and despite the long delay, seeing a company get started was
`interesting. For me, it was the process, not the product, that counted most.
`
`Correction: June 22, 2014
`The Bits column last Sunday, about a startup company’s
`hurdles in developing a combination phone case and charger,
`referred incorrectly to a policy change made by Kickstarter, the
`crowdfunding site that was used by the company. The change
`required that hardware projects funded on the site show a
`prototype, not necessarily a finished product. The column also
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`misstated the year of the policy change. It was 2012, not 2013.
`A version of this article appears in print on 06/15/2014, on page BU3 of the
`NewYork edition with the headline: Why That Phone Charger Took Two Years to
`Arrive.
`
`© 2016 The New York Times Company
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`http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/14/whythatphonechargertooktwoyearstoarrive/?_r=1
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