New Kickstarter Campaign Features Eco-Friendly Pet Product
Gilboa, NY (PRWEB) May 05, 2015 -- Fred and Natasha Ruckel, small business owners based in the Catskill Mountains, NY are calling upon the well-known crowd-funding community to help back their project.
Kickstarter has reportedly received more than $1.6 billion in pledges from 8.5 million backers to fund over 84,000 creative projects. With these impressive statistics in mind, Fred and Natasha Ruckel decided to create a campaign that helped them present their invention to the entrepreneurial-minded community.
“There are so many ways for entrepreneurs to bring products to market these days,” says Fred “Natasha and I decided that it was time to reach out to some the online-based communities and make our invention become real – it’s called the ‘Ripple Rug’.”
Inspired by their Cat named Yoda, who apparently spent many hours playing with and digging her nails into their living room rug, they decided to create the Ripple Rug.
“Kickstarter’s not only a great way of crowd-funding a start-up idea,” says Natasha, “But it’s really a great business exercise for any entrepreneur trying to bring their product or service to market. Creating a campaign really pushes you to think about how to communicate to your audience and pitch your business to an investor. We worked tirelessly for several weeks, creating a video and all the elements for our Ripple Rug campaign.”
Fred and Natasha 100% funded their DIY development and testing costs. On the production side, they purchased a sewing machine, and learned how to use it – in order to sew together working prototypes.
Manufacturing was an important business consideration for the Ruckels. They wanted to keep control of the product’s quality - to ensure that cats everywhere would be safe. They also wanted to know that conditions for workers in factories would meet high-standards. The answer was to keep production in USA. "We discovered that manufacturing in the USA could be up to four-times more expensive than abroad, but we decided that staying in the United States was the right thing to do," says Fred Ruckel.
They also wanted to use environmentally friendly materials in the construction of their product. “The carpet used in the Ripple Rug is made from 100% recycled plastics bottles,” adds Fred, “For each rug produced we save 24 bottles from floating in the sea or going into landfill.”
Their 30-day Kickstarter campaign started on May 4th, 2015 (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/843824402/the-ripple-rug-youll-wonder-how-it-doesnt-already?ref=category). It features their cat Yoda, who happily played with all the Ripple Rug Prototypes and posed patiently for all campaign photos and videos.
Fred Ruckel, SnugglyCat Inc., http://snugglycat.com, +1 (607) 588-6412, [email protected]
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