We hope you all had a wonderful holiday season and were able to spend time with friends, family and other loved ones.
We are looking forward to the coming year and excited about the prospects of taking the Garbage Can Fly Trap global. On that front, optimization of the Garbage Can Fly Trap for manufacturing has been completed by the design engineering firm we contracted once the Kickstarter funded. The engineers were able to reduce the total number of parts and make the remaining parts more robust. These changes will decrease the cost of manufacturing (less material and less labor) yet increase the strength of the traps. We are ready to begin manufacturing of the molds necessary to produce the Garbage Can Fly Trap.
We continue to work with the City of San Diego’s Environmental Services Department. Our most recent meeting was very promising. The City validated the traps work! Of course we knew that but good to hear it from yet one more source. Our contact there showed us photos of all the dead flies in the traps we provided… now Dennis isn’t the ONLY man in San Diego walking around with pictures of dead flies on his phone! Environmental Services will be sharing this information with the City of San Diego Mayor’s Office. We are very interested in putting these traps to work in one of San Diego’s beach communities this summer to address the fly problem there.
Also, our meeting with the President of the manufacturing plant in China went really well. It’s a family-owned business that has been manufacturing injection molded parts for more than 30 years in China. Their daughter, a current UCSD student, reached out to us and arranged a meeting with her parents when they visited in November. Her father is an engineer and her mother manages the business (sound familiar?) We look forward to sending them the new design very soon in order to begin work.
We also look forward to being there (China) when the first injection molded parts are released from the mold. In addition to our desire to understand the manufacturing process from start to finish, it is important to us to ensure a high standard of quality in the final product for our customers.
We wish you and your family a happy and healthy new year!
Sincerely,
Dennis and Joylyn