The Story Of The Little Dustbin

The Story
Of the Little
Dustbin’s Batch Production

By Chris Ebbert

Once upon a tyme,
Not too far from the beer gardens of southern Germany, there was a product design consultant named Chris. This struggling consultant soon met a friendly, Turkish businessman named Hürriyett, who desperately wanted to have a product all his own. Hürriyett and his brothers, who ran a successful business selling frying pans at trade fairs under a franchise agreement, felt that a product of their own, whose exclusive rights they would hold, would enable them to break free from the tyranny of the big, evil frying pan franchise, and make them very, very rich.

Hürriyett and Chris went on to meet regularly over lavish, Turkish dinners in fine restaurants, and decided that the best product to create would be a little household dustbin. But it would have to be the most beautiful and amusing dustbin in the entire world. And it would have to be unbelievably clever, because otherwise, people might just ignore it.

It was agreed that Chris should work for a consultancy fee, and become co-owner of the patent later-on.

Chris then started thinking hard, brooding over piles of paper napkins from Turkish restaurants, which had been scribbled and sketched on profusely with pens borrowed from waiters and other guests. Hürriyett and Chris had soon produced a mountain of sketches, trying to come up with concepts for the little dustbin. Looking at them all with a comparing eye, it soon occurred to Chris that the best idea would be to create a dustbin which would clamp down the bin liner around the edges to prevent it from falling in, somehow including the inside of the lid. And it would have to have large, exchangeable caps on the lid, to allow for a customized look, and to make it look like a little monster which opened its mouth whenever someone stepped on the pedal. This all amused Chris very much, and he created 18 colourful drawings to present the concept to Hürriyett and his brothers.

Over a water pipe, the concept amused the three Turks just as much, and it was agreed that a study model should be built. Hürriyett gave Chris the equivalent of 50 pounds and the keys to the company bicycle to go and get what it would take to build a cardboard model.

Chris went and built the cardboard model, and it worked well.

This made the three brothers very happy, and they decided that a working prototype should be built. Hürriyett gave Chris the equivalent of 300 pounds and the keys to the company’s 500-year-old executive car to go and have the prototype built somehow, somewhere.

Chris drove the disintegrating BMW 750i to the shop of his friend Werner, across the border, in France, and instructed him to laminate a working fibreglass model of the little dustbin. Werner, a long-haired biker who lived on cappuccino and nicotine, and normally produced fibreglass cows and amusement park rides in his shop, set to work and produced a nice working prototype of the little dustbin.

The three Turkish brothers were by now incredibly excited and needed to smoke the water pipe a lot to stay calm. The dustbin was working, and it looked nice. Now they would have to get a patent, somehow find a way to produce the little dustbin, and open up marketing avenues. To make sure they would be taken seriously, they bought a big, black Mercedes 600 SEL with lots of frying pan money. Then they told Chris to somehow take care of the patent and the manufacturing, while they would go looking for suitable exhibitions, fairs, companies, and telemarketing ventures to sell the little dustbin, and smoke the water pipe a bit more.

Chris scratched his head a lot and realized that he had to produce some very specific information now, based on which any manufacturing company would be able to quote him a price for the production of the little dustbin, and to be able to apply for a patent. This meant he had to construct the production version of the little dustbin in great detail, on his computer, in a 3D-CAD program, to be able to say exactly what kinds of parts would be needed, and how many of them, and how strong they would have to be, and what exactly they would have to be made of. This took him two strenuous weeks. As he went, he soon realized that he would have to decide how the little dustbin would be produced, and exactly which processes he intended to make use of for the manufacturing process. He had it worked out after a while that there were two options: Either he would design the dustbin for mass production by injection moulding, which meant huge startup investments, but cheap, clean, and quick manufacturing, or batch production by vacuum-forming, which meant cheap setup costs, but lots of niggling problems and corrections during the manufacturing process. He designed two different versions of the little dustbin, one for mass production, and one for batch production. Then he started looking for possible manufacturers. Using the 500-year-old car, he drove to Italy, Switzerland, and Austria, to meet with mighty plastics moulders, who promised to give top quality at premium prices, be it batch- or mass production. Their prices caused the three Turks much despair, and no further they went with them. Being a careful sort of man, Chris had every single one of the mighty plastics moulders sign a confidentiality agreement, to make sure they wouldn’t turn around and steal the little dustbin-idea before it was protected by a patent. This now proved a wise idea, as none of them would enter into a business agreement with the three Turks.

So Chris turned east instead and invited an illustrious bunch of plastics moulders from China and India, who conjured up stories of varying credibility as to their capabilities, some of them a bit crazy. After much haggling, bragging, and wining and dining, a nice gentleman named Deepak, from Bombay, emerged as the one whose offer was favoured by the three brothers. He claimed to be able to bring the dustbin into production for one-third of the price of the Chinese competitors, and to be able to do this within only three weeks, making use of a seamless chain of excellent, cutting-edge technology he had command over due to the fact that he and his brothers were engineers who could simply build any machine they needed. This caused the three brothers so much joy that they immediately lit their water pipe, and they stayed connected to it for an entire evening, and there was much laughter and commotion, and it was decided that Chris should go to India and create a great manufacturing empire within a few days...

Meanwhile, Chris had found a patent attorney who set to work in writing the patent application for the little dustbin. In order to be able to lift his pen, this noble man required the equivalent of about 2000 pounds first, which the three brothers gladly gave him. The patent application the noble man was about to write would protect the concept of the little dustbin from copycats until the patent would be either granted or denied. The patent would be granted only if the attorney was able to prove that the little dustbin was entirely different from all other dustbins in existence, whether they were patented or not. And the patent would be denied if he failed to do so. If it was denied, the attorney would have to find a way to re-write the patent application until it differed so much from similar patents that the little dustbin’s patent would finally be granted. This could take years, and cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.

This is why the Turks were anxious to get the little dustbin onto the market quickly, to generate revenue to pay for the coming legal fees.

Thus Chris was bundled off to India to help bring the little dustbin to life. There, everything was very different from Europe, and even though Chris was allowed all the Chicken Tikka Masala he wanted, it took not 3 weeks, but 11 months until he was able to return home. It may have had something to do with the fact that the Indian brothers turned out to be breathtakingly clueless after all, and weren’t capable in the least of building anything remotely like they had promised.

This is what happened:

Normally, when plastic parts are developed, the product design consultant will painstakingly sculpt a plasticine version of the future part by hand first; as this is time-consuming, and expensive, only one-half of the part is normally sculpted. The other half is produced by scanning the half-part with a 3D-scanner, with whose data collection a virtual model of the half-part forms automatically on a computer; that virtual part is fed into a milling machine, which carves out a perfectly clean and symmetrical model of the full part, made of a material which is hard enough to be used as a mould for the first few parts to be produced with. All this normally takes around two to three weeks.

Unfortunately, none of this technology was available to Chris at the manufacturing plant in Bombay, and Deepak, the nice gentleman who owned the company, and his brothers were very surprised that Chris thought he needed any of it, and that it existed at all. They had thought Chris would be happy to accept the services of the company’s senior carpenter, a charming old man named Mistry, who spoke no English, but carved beautiful things out of wood on a balcony overlooking the palm tree-lined company parking lot in East Goregaon, while porters served glasses of hot tea with milk, and little stray dogs were licking his bare feet. Quaint though this prospect had seemed to Chris, he felt wild despair: How was he supposed to deliver a product which would stand up to the rigors of the European market’s requirements, under these circumstances, within three weeks?

It was obvious that Deepak and his brothers had good vacuum forming machines, but getting the moulds done symmetrically in an acceptable quality seemed impossible now. Chris consulted with his Turks, who understood the situation and conceded that they’d gladly pay Chris to stay in India until everything would be finished.

So, Chris, who tended to write steep bills, and who began to like India, shook his head in disbelief, arranged to stay for a long time, and started to improvise. He found that there was a kind of childrens’ plasticine in India which, even though it had the consistency of a shredded stray dog in tooth paste, and tended to run like ice cream in the tropical climate, could be made to perform reasonably well as a first mould in the vacuum former if cooled in the company’s refrigerator over night. Chris spent weeks modeling moulds from shredded stray dog with scissors and caps of pens, refrigerating the model in the evening, and usually ringing for the shop manager, who was waiting in standby-mode in front of the small office, on completion of a part in the morning. The wiry man would then hurry off with the ice-cold, ridiculously coloured mould, running fast across the hot workshop, in order to reach the moulding machine before the model could get soft. He then immediately took a plastic imprint of the model. Whenever this worked, everyone was very happy. Sometimes it didn’t work, which meant that everyone had to wait until the model had melted and been poured out of the ruined mould, and put back into the refrigerator to get hard enough for modeling again. Meanwhile, Chris would stroll off to have a tall glass of fine Kingfisher beer and play with stray dogs in the parking lot, and come back two hours later to carve the same part again, hoping that it would work this time.

After many weeks, all parts of the little dustbin had finally been moulded from ABS, using frozen models; hard, acrylic casts had been made from them to develop the aluminium production moulds. Understandably, the finish left much to be desired, and Chris had to oversee a small army of workers who were busy sanding down the acrylic casts, and later grinding down the aluminium ones with sandpaper and flexes, to make them smooth and symmetrical.

In the meantime, Deepak and his brothers crisscrossed Bombay in rickshaws, hunting down subcontractors who would be able to produce stickers and the necessary, small metal parts for hinges. Finding ways to communicate to the very relaxed factory workers that it actually did matter where exactly on the product stickers and drill holes were to be positioned proved a huge issue. In the end, putting depressions into the moulds in the appropriate locations, and offering a Swiss watch to the worker who would hit the right position most reliably did wonders for quality control.

In July, Chris flew to Istanbul for the first time to present the little dustbin to Hürriyett and his brothers. They were very happy, but thought that it should be just a teeny bit larger.

So Chris flew back to Bombay and started everything all-over again, just to make the little dustbin a teeny bit larger.

By October, this was done, and the little dustbin was produced in great numbers. Container after container arrived in Europe, Turkey, and the Arab Gulf States, and the three Turkish brothers and Chris went from one business meeting to the next, and smoked the water pipe a lot.

Amazingly, the patent had been granted without any difficulties. But the patent only protected the little dustbin in Germany and France, and the three brothers found so many wholesalers elsewhere, that they had to pay the noble patent attorney an additional 30.000 pounds to apply for patents for the little dustbin in other countries, as well.

This they did, and the little dustbin sold well for a while, and almost everyone lived happily ever after.