The Quirky Blog

We can’t believe tomorrow marks the first day of December. It seems like just yesterday that November started showing its colors and ushering us into the holiday season. With Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday behind us, we’re excited for the home stretch. But first, here’s a look back at what happened this week.

The Awesomer featured Risers in a recent post and Thrillist included Pen Zen in their Cyber Monday deals. The latter are good until tomorrow, so get on them quick! Pivot Power Mini was featured in Fast Company’s gift guide, and Converge was included in Cool Hunting’s. Thor appeared on page seven of Men’s Health’s winter gear lineup, while Plug Hub made it onto Apartment Therapy’s tech gift guide, and Stem was included in Gloss.com’s top holiday gifts list. Verseur was included in Real Simple’s “Clever items to simplify your life” list and Apartment Therapy posted on Smart Shade. Finally, Mashable include Quirky in their 2012 Innovation Index! Head on over and click on the face of Alexandra Wilkis Wilson (the CEO of Gilt Group) to cast your vote.

In addition to all the great press, we had an epic number product projects and launches. Things were kicked off with a community design phase for the Bluetooth dice,  which were quickly followed by a second CMF phase for Fort Factory. The Bluetooth Jump Rope, iPhone Kickstand Stylus, and iPod Nano Clip Case all had Naming, Tagline, and CMF phases, while a research phase was launched for the Custom Headband and a Refine phase was opened for the Ice Cream Drill Scoop. We even launched a few new project types, including flash naming and tagline phases for the Plug Bobber, a tagline flash phase for the Ice Ring Pop, a special CMF phase for Squeak dedicated to readying our cleaning line for production, and a Process phase for the Jelly Bracelet Maker.  In product launch news, we introduced the innovative children’s toy, Scribblers, the magical egg separator, Pluck, and the insanely convenient iPad kitchen stand, Prep Step. Check out the awesome videos our media team created for Scribblers and Pluck.

The big focuses of the Quirky blog and social media world over the past week were our holiday deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but we made sure to keep thing informative in other ways as well. Monday’s design tip focused on the importance of simplicity in product development, and the same day we gave you a behind the scenes look a Scoop. On Wednesday we were proud to announce that we’ll be making the convertible iPad case, Shift, and Carli showed us how Quirky products can help everyone unleash their inner wine connoisseur this holiday season. After publishing our Brainstorm recap, we announced a big change to our process: from this point forward, sales influence will no longer be offered. While we’re sure some were sad to hear this, we’re making up for it by dramatically increasing the amount of influence available for the community design phase! We wrapped up the week with a second entry to our “Popular Inventions Our Kids Won’t Recognize” series.

And that’s what went down this week. If we forgot to mention anything, please let us know in the comments below. Between now and Monday, enjoy this recording of yesterday’s Eval, and remember that our support team will be available to answer your calls from 9am-9pm all weekend if you have any questions. Have a great weekend!

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