So it seems there is still some work to be done on our handwashing station design. After a month and a half of testing, we realized we had failed to account for certain forces acting upon the handwashing stations… children. We learned that children loved playing with the handwashing stations, which is great, except that they were dropping them as well. We lost 6 out of our 26 handwashing stations due to the combination of youthful energy and the gravitational pull of the Earth.
This, of course, was a bit discouraging. I definitely didn’t want to be selling shoddy handwashing stations to our community, but there was still a high demand for this product. Almost all the families that we talked to about their handwashing station were very happy with the product, and some of the families with broken handwashing stations wanted a replacement. Even people walking by our offices would see us making handwashing stations and stop by to try and purchase one.
So, we decided to invest more time into developing a better product for our community, and went back to the drawing board. In the end, we came up with a more robust and simple design which we hope will be survivable in the real world. As you can see in this video, we can drop our handwashing stations with little effect on its performance. We’ll continue to torture test our handwashing stations as we retrofit the old handwashing stations that we’ve already sold. Of course, in order to fully test this new design we’ll be selling it to another pilot group. We’ve already got 30 new orders for this new prototype and we’ll see how they fare in the real world.