Egg Pants
$20 for a set of two
Available here

It was Fall 2006, and I was in my senior year at Pratt Institute, studying industrial design. My main studio for the semester centered on a single project. I was assigned to research manufacturing processes, choose one, and design a product for the home which would be manufactured using that technique.

I started my research, and when I discovered a process called dip-molding, I knew that this was going to be it. It was a relatively low-cost process for molding flexible plastic pieces. It had a lot of design constraints, which I saw as positive. The constraints gave me direction.

The biggest constraint of dip-molding is that little drippy blobs are going to occur on the bottom of your piece. I eventually realized that my mission was to come up with a form that embraced the drips, a form where the drips would make sense. I had the idea for a vessel which stood on three legs.

Stepping back and looking at it, I thought that the vessel would be pretty good for holding an egg.

I took this sketch into class, and my teacher encouraged me to take the next step and put it into Solidworks. I built the thing, rendered it out, and the direction for Egg Pants was set. I thought I pretty much had everything figured out at this point. It was mid-semester, and the design was done, right?

Oh boy, did I have a lot to learn. The design WAS done. However, like most design students, I had no idea how much engineering, marketing, and business would need to happen in order to complete the product development cycle. At this point, I could have made a representative model or rapid prototype, put the thing in my portfolio, and left it there to die.

Luckily, though, my teacher saw the potential for this to become a real product and pushed me to take it farther. It was still early enough in the semester that it seemed feasible to get the piece prototyped at an actual dip-molding factory by the end of the semester. So I started googling for dip-molders. I started making phone calls and sending emails with my Solidworks model. One factory got back to me with a $500 quote to make the prototype.

I was, like any college student, scared out of my mind by the $500 price tag. But again, my teacher pushed me to do it, and I threw down my savings/beer money on tooling for an egg cup.

Once I made the decision to do it, things really got stressful. I had to make a much more detailed drawing for the factory than the one I’d initially produced, I had to send them a purchase order, I had to talk shop about whether to cast or machine the aluminum tool, and I had to spec out the thickness and height of the final pieces. If I screwed this up, I was out $500 plus I wouldn’t have enough time to make a new model before the crit.

Luckily, my paranoia and agony over the final drawings paid off, and the pieces I got back were almost perfect. My crit went smashingly. I was so excited that I continued working with the manufacturer over my winter break, and did another round of prototypes, tweaking the wall-thickness and ultimately deciding to do it with two colors: white on the outside and yellow on the inside.

The tooling was done, the manufacturing bugs had all been figured out, and now I wanted to introduce my little Egg Pants to the world. I asked a friend who had been working on developing a product himself for advice, and he told me to take pictures and send them to blogs. So that’s what I did.

One of the blogs I sent it to was Design*Sponge, who put up this post almost right away.

About a week later, I got an email from one of the buyers at the MoMA Store, saying that they’d seen Egg Pants on Design*Sponge and would like a sample to review. Oh. My. God. I freaked out and screamed for a little, and then I packaged up my precious little prototypes and sent them on over to MoMA.

They ended up putting in an order. It was March 2007, I was a couple months from graduation, and MoMA wanted to order a product that I hadn’t yet manufactured. This was not a bad problem to have, but it was a problem nonetheless.

I called up various members of my family, told them the story, and asked if they would consider giving me any graduation gifts in advance, so I could put the money into manufacturing these things. They thought I was relatively nuts. They also thought that out of all the things a 21-year-old could blow money a lot of money on, this was at least kind of productive. So I secured the funds, gave the go-ahead to the manufacturer, and had 2,500 Egg Pants made.

I was terrified.

I had to figure out packaging, sourcing boxes and labels. And I had to wait and pray that I wasn’t going to end up with a couple thousand defective Egg Cups. When the production run came in, and everything looked right, I finally breathed a sigh of relief. NOW the product was done.

This was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done. It was also one of the most rewarding. I learned invaluable, real-world lessons about how to deal with manufacturers, buyers, and press. Most importantly, I gained the confidence to pursue what I love to do and turn it into a business.