The reducing board will be the most used object in your kitchen, however its design hasn’t modified significantly since 3,000 BCE, when the ancient Egyptians began using slabs of wood for food preparation.
The reducing board has to do a number of work: It wants to soak up knife marks, absorb onion juice, and be large enough to carry greens and scraps. Every day, house cooks are compelled to confront the logistical drawback of the place to place the parsley they only chopped after they transfer on to the carrots. By the tip of meal prep, the kitchen counter is affected by meals waste and crowded with mismatched bowls of elements.
It looks as if a minor inconvenience, one that the majority of us handle on daily basis. However Tom Palmer believed the standard reducing board may very well be improved. Palmer had spent eight years as an automotive engineer at GM who led a crew of 54 staff engaged on the Cadillac Escalade. However on the aspect, he was an obsessive woodworker. “As quickly as I purchased my home I needed to make furnishings for it,” he says. “And one of many first belongings you begin making are reducing boards.”
He made one for his dad and mom and added slightly waste tray to the highest that linked via magnets. They saved telling him how helpful it was. So Palmer continued to tinker with the design, including bowls on the aspect and rethinking the supplies.
Two years of improvement later, he’s launching Prepwell. It’s a modular reducing board system referred to as the Chef Station that has 4 totally different trays that may be hooked up to a few sides of the stable wooden board with magnets to carry elements and scraps. The set comes with silicone liners for the trays that may be thrown within the dishwasher, in addition to chrome steel liners which can be oven-safe for cooking.
It’s also possible to purchase a supplemental board that clips to the highest to separate greens and meat. “If we might create a system that was good for cooking, serving, and storing, we might have one thing that individuals would need,” Palmer says of his considering for the design.
There’s a catch, although. The complete Prepwell system prices $545, and in order for you the supplemental board or lids, that’ll value you one other $75 and $35, respectively. This makes Palmer’s product roughly 10 instances dearer than the common reducing board in the marketplace—and considerably greater than even high-end reducing boards like Boos Blocks, whose costliest boards value roughly $300.
After I examined the Prepwell Chef Station, I used to be impressed by how thoughtfully it’s designed for on a regular basis use. The board and the trays all snap collectively completely, which allowed me to create a neat workstation. As I reduce asparagus, tofu, and inexperienced onions, I slid them into separate trays. After I began cooking, I used to be in a position to throw them into the pan on the proper time. The supplemental board was a game-changer for me. I’m used to doing a shuffle between meat and vegetable boards. However this method made the method seamless.
Palmer admits that his product is dear, however he says he’s discovered a marketplace for it. To fund the preliminary stock, he turned to Kickstarter, launching a marketing campaign that ran final fall. The marketing campaign garnered 1,380 preorders, which he’s simply shipped out, and the model’s web site is now up and working and prepared for brand new prospects.
Maybe it’s not stunning that an ultra-high-end reducing board is seeing success. People are spending extra on their kitchens than ever. The U.S. kitchenware market is forecast to grow from $20.37 billion in 2024 to $37.19 billion in 2033. Our pandemic-era obsession with upgrading home life by no means fully subsided, and many individuals have saved up the cooking habits they cultivated throughout lockdown.
Add to that the truth that youthful generations care loads about how the merchandise of their kitchen look, and the expansion of aesthetically pleasing cookware manufacturers like Caraway and Our Place is sensible. These developments formed Palmer’s strategy to Prepwell’s design. “Should you had been going to have pals over for dinner, would you allow this out, or would you wish to cover it away?” he asks.
Palmer says his goal buyer is anybody who has ever tucked a reducing board within the pantry earlier than company arrived. As he’s studied the shoppers who’ve bought his Chef Station up to now, he’s discovered that they embody design obsessives, critical house cooks prepared to pay for a greater system, and newly married {couples} investing in outfitting their first house.
A 12 months in the past, Palmer determined to concentrate on Prepwell in earnest. He went to his supervisor at GM and requested for a 12-month depart of absence to see whether or not he might make this enterprise work. His supervisor agreed. And his coaching has turned out to be a giant asset all through the R&D course of.
Palmer has spent his profession managing manufacturing unit relationships, holding suppliers to time and high quality necessities, and designing for manufacturing at scale. All of this got here in helpful as he labored with abroad companions to go from his authentic handcrafted prototypes to mass manufacturing. “If you’ve gone via manufacturing,” he says, “you study concerning the failure factors within the system. No matter I’m designing must be foolproof.”
As an illustration, when designing for automobiles, Palmer is aware of it makes extra sense to decide on specialist factories for every part, despite the fact that it’s simpler and extra streamlined to discover a single manufacturing unit that may make all of them. For Prepwell, he’s discovered separate factories for metal and wooden. To find out about their quality-control processes he visited the factories in particular person.
Prior to now, many direct-to-consumer manufacturers would increase enterprise capital to launch a product like this. However Palmer has chosen to not go that route. For anybody who noticed the DTC increase of the early 2010s—the mattress, baggage, and towel startups that burned via VC money on Fb advertisements with out ever turning a revenue—Palmer’s strategy looks as if a deliberate correction. Prepwell is working paid advertisements on Meta, however the math is straightforward: Promote greater than you spend, and scale from there.
Just a few weeks after launching Prepwell’s web site, Palmer says the corporate is already worthwhile. “We’re attempting to postpone a fundraise so long as potential,” he says. “Simply bootstrap it so long as we will.”
