About Us
We are Dennis and Joylyn and our 3 year old son, the fly expert. We invented the Garbage Can Fly Trap in the summer of 2014 in our kitchen on a warm summer day when we noticed a fly struggling for nearly 10 minutes to get in to our garbage can through the lid. One of us (don't really remember which) suggested that we drill a hole in the lid and let the fly into the garbage can BUT add a trap under the lid to capture it. So we did and in 15 minutes we caught our first fly! Dennis, the engineer in the family, went to work right away on various designs for the trap and cartridges. He added a "Quick-Release Button" on the top of the trap allowing for hands free disposal of the cartridge into your trash without ever having to touch it.
In the summer of 2015, we formed our LLC and filed the first patent application. Then we launched a Kickstarter (crowdfunding website) to see if there was enough market demand from customers to bring this product to market. We funded our Kickstarter reaching 130% of our goal and raising $13,000 in pre-orders from customers from more than 20 countries!
We hired a mechanical engineer to optimize the fly trap and cartridge for injection molding. We went from 24 parts in the 3-D printed fly trap down to 4 and changed from a paper cartridge (assembled by hand by yours truly) to an injection molded plastic version.
A Chinese student at UCSD reached out to us when she saw us on Fox news. Her parents have been making plastic injection molded products for 30 years (they hate flies too!) in China and they were interested in making our fly traps for us. In May 2016, we traveled to China to inspect the first products coming out of the molds at their factory. They look and work great!
We finalized the packaging and imported our first shipment of Garbage Can Fly Traps in August 2016!
We'd love to hear from you and especially how much you hate flies too!
**Our company is woman and veteran owned. Dennis is a former US Navy Deep Sea Diver and he earned his engineering degree from University of California San Diego (UCSD) at the ripe old age of 44! Joylyn has her M.B.A. in marketing and international business from San Diego State University.
Contact Information:
Joylyn Darnell
Joylyn@garbagecanflytrap.com
Dennis Darnell
garbagecanflytrap@gmail.com
Phone: 858-228-0659