Brain-Numbingly Cool Popsicles
- 6:30 am |
In 1905, an 11-year-old boy named Frank Epperson invented the treat we call the Popsicle. He had mixed a soda drink with a wooden stick and accidentally left it outside on a cold winter night. The next day he found it frozen into a puck. He liked the taste, and dubbed his accidental creation the “Eppsicle.” Eighteen years later, Epperson patented his frozen “drink on a stick” — a design that remained largely unchanged until 2008, when industrial designer Ken Zorovich entered the scene.
Zorovich was running a successful design firm, handling projects for clients like Mattel and Nike. He also dabbled in kitchen-table inventions, and alighted upon the idea of improving “ice pop” molds. Existing molds took 24 hours to freeze, But using a simple mechanical structure called a heat exchange, the time could be reduced 200-fold to seven minutes. He patented the design and called his toaster-sized product “Zoku”.
This may sound like a gadget worthy of a late-night infomercial, not a design blog, but the new device unleashed a torrent of confectionery creativity.
Zorovich found that slices of fruit would stick to the frigid mold like they were glued on. When juice was poured in, the contrast created a neat visual effect. A designer on his team realized that if you cut fruit shapes in a certain way, you could use the pieces to create pops that looked like animals or cartoon characters.
So, the team created a new “Character Kit” of stencils. Suddenly, ice pops could be decorated like cupcakes.
“I always hated Mr. Potato Head because the eyes, lips and ears could only go one place,” Zorovich says, “so we designed the stencils to be generic enough that people bring their imagination to it.”
The product launched to great success at Williams-Sonoma, and quickly spread to Target, Amazon, and other retailers. Shortly after its debut, customers started requesting recipes. “They were demanding them, which caught us by surprise, since you don’t think of ice pops needing recipes” says Zorovich.
In response, the team at Zoku created a cookbook of 40 recipes that covered a broad flavor palette from Vietnamese coffee pops to “Mother’s Helper” mimosa concoctions. They styled and photographed their creations, and self-published the cookbook, which is sold alongside the product at many retailers. The book generates revenue, but also acts as a “Point of Purchase” display, demonstrating the capabilities of this new category of product.
Zoku means “family” in Japanese. One of the sales reps for the product told Zorovich that his favorite thing about the product was the way it gave him a chance to spend more quality time with his daughter. Some parents are using the Zoku to make healthy eating more fun by replacing sugary cereal with fruit and greek yogurt “breakfast pops.”
Being geared towards family activity, the most important aspect of the design is that it offers a low-input, high-output experience. Baking cupcakes with your kids it is a major time commitment: You need to prep ingredients, mix batter, fill and bake the cakes, let them cool, prepare decorations, and before you know it, half the day is gone. Zoku offers the same kitchen-craft bonding time, but you can enjoy your creation in 30 minutes — more creative quality time with the kids, fewer dishes to clean.
Zoku is a scrappy designer’s success story. Zorovich and his team accomplished something none of the other major kitchen gadget makers could manage: They found a way to make simple, intuitive improvements on an old staple.
When you hear success stories like this, or consider the number of innovative products setting sail on Kickstarter, it’s easy to believe that the chilly, rigid world of manufacturing and retailing is beginning to thaw.