A Quirky Review of Quirky Incorporated

Do you have an idea for an invention? If so, and your idea is chosen, Quirky brings your ideas to life from start to finish. They do all the patents, manufacturing and retail of your invention. In return, the inventor is rewarded 42% of the sales for life on each unit sold.

Brief History Of Quirky

Quirky was founded by CEO Ben Kaufman in 2007. Prior to Quirky, Kaufman was the inventor and entrepreneur of Mophie; a linear headphone. During the design phase of Mophie, he had people draw sketches of what the product should look like before production. Mophie became a brand that helped influence the IPOD Shuffle. Kaufman took the risk of selling Mophie for his own start-up business called Kluster to incorporate a business platform where thousands of people can influence products and share a piece of the pie when it goes to retail. Kaufman changed the name of Kluster to Quirky. Thus Quirky was born.

A person who has an idea for a product needs to go online to the Quirky website at www.Quriky.com and submit their idea with only a ten dollar investment. UPDATE 3/2014: (There is no longer a Ten Dollar investment fee and 30 day cycle) Immediately following your submission, your idea will go live for a period of 7days. During the 7 days you can make changes, add images and/or illustrations. At that time the Quirky Community gets to vote on the ideas they would like to see go to production. Also, within those 7 days the Quirky Staff will choose the best and most popular ideas; that were voted on for consideration. The ideas that are under consideration will make it to the next phase when the Quirky Staff picks the most popular ideas (voted by the Community) to push forward. If your idea wasn't chosen after the 7 days you have three options: (1) resubmit it for another 7 days, (2) keep it in the Quirky archive or (3) take your idea somewhere else.

If your idea goes into production, you receive 42% royalties for life.

What is Influence: In Quirky, influence earns you money for your input on decisions that are presented to you on each product. Quirky distributes 30% of its earning to the community of influencers that participated on the winning products.

To earn influence you must first become a member of the Quirky community. Sign-up is free and entitles you to submit your idea and influence other people's ideas. To earn influence, you need to vote on the ideas you like best, help choose a color, shape, design, title for a product, price you would pay for it, name a tag-line, etc.

If that product is chosen (by the Quirky Staff) for manufacturing and retail, you will receive money on that product (per sale) only if you participated on it. You will receive more of a percentage of influence if for example; your choices on branding wins. So you never know if your decisions are the most popular by the community. For example; lets say you chose the color blue for a product and the majority voted green, and Quirky agrees, the people who voted green will earn more influence. You would still get awarded influence for blue, but not so much. So it's really a matter of luck of the draw.

Helpful Tips For Earning Influence:

• Stay proactive in the community daily by voting and adding comments.
• Tell your friends and family to vote and comment on your idea.
• Spread your ideas to your social media e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc., for votes
• Vote and participate on as many products you would consider buying for yourself if it were made.
• Participate on surveys if you're lucky to get one on a product.
• Have Fun!

Note: Every Thursday Evening at 7 PM Eastern Time, Quirky has a live stream broadcast that you can watch when the Quirky team and staff make their final decision on which products that were under consideration, get picked. You can post your comments in real-time on a feed. I particularly like watching these to see which ones get chosen and why other products did not.

Above is the link that explains the breakdown of the percentages of influence.

This commercial starring CEO Ben Kaufman, first aired on May 17, 2014 during the season finale of Saturday Night Live. Take a look!

Introducing Garthen Leslie, the inventor of AROS, the first Smart Air Conditioner of it's kind! This also aired on May 17, 2014 during the season finale of Saturday Night Live. Garthen came up with the idea for this air conditioner out of frustration of his own window air conditioner.

Quirky makes real people's ideas a reality. This is proof!

Here is an example of some of the products that were invented by someone's idea at Quirky. These are some of the best selling products by consumers.

The Piviot Power

A flexible outlet that will fit around furniture and will hold large adapters.This product won the Red Dot award in 2012. I have seen this product in Target. You can also order from Quirky's website.

Easily holds wine bottles horizontally on a table or refrigerator. Just slip one of the disks over the bottle and that's it.

Separating egg whites has never been better. This is the most easiest egg extractor ever.

Quirky has partnered with Home Depot and GE for bringing Smart Products to reality. For those of you who own Smart Phones, Quirky's Wink products that are partnered with GE, allow for you to operate things around the house or anywhere remotely.

Smart Products that were just released are:

• Spotter - Monitor motion, sound, light, temperature, and humidity from your mobile device.
• Egg Minder - Wirelessly connects to your mobile device to track the number of eggs you have and tell you when they’re going bad.
• Nimbus - Monitor your commute traffic, weather, email, calendar, social media networks, and more.
• Porkolio - The world’s smartest piggy bank. Keeps track of the balance from your mobile device.