How I...
- Author:
- Ben Haslam
- Business:
- Tynedale Fine Art Products Ltd
- Published:
- 17/04/2009 11:08:00
To develop my idea, I teamed up with a practically minded friend, Mr Karl Hajda, who lived in my village at the time. Together, we set on developing a series of prototypes and models that would work and that we believed could be produced as a commercial and viable product. It involved hundreds of hours working together in the evenings in a freezing cold former cow byre!
We didn’t have any money ourselves but were able to give all our free time to developing the business, scrimping and saving to buy all sorts of everyday materials and scraps. After 4 prototypes we had one that worked really well and we made some cosmetic models out of wood and fibreglass that would be used to illustrate a finished concept.
We filed for patent and I made an appointment with two world-leading materials manufacturers in the UK that I had worked for as a materials demonstrator. Although the meetings went well and they liked the product, they did not want to invest the money needed to develop the commercial product further.
It was a blow at the time, but we didn’t give up searching for investment. 8 months later, and totally out of the blue, one of the companies called me to say that they knew a business in Sweden, Keba AB, that might be interested! Within 3 weeks I was on a plane to Gothenburg facing a life changing moment. I count securing that investment in the products’ development as our biggest success so far.
We knew that we both had very good ideas and we fully believed that these were worth something. They were also commercial ideas which we wanted to become successful.
However, we didn’t anticipate the process to take so long and be such a difficult journey. It took 3 years to get to the product development stage and a further 3 years until the first retail sales. But I have always dreamed that I would open a retail outlet, gallery and studio and that I would see our product ideas in stores worldwide.