Today we’d like to introduce you to Zane Coffin and Neil Deshpande.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Zane and Neil. So, let’s start at the beginning, and we can move on from there.
Neil – My wife and I own about 2,000 books and have used various built-in and modular shelving solutions to hold them over the course of a decade. We wanted something nicer, but also something flexible enough to give to our friends.
Since I worked with sheet metal at work and had access to machine shops that could work with it, it was an easy choice. The design we liked best was Cubic, a shelving module that was just 12″ wide and, when installed, looked like a set of squares tiling the wall. We didn’t like it well enough to go beyond the prototype stage.
Zane – I met Neil a few years ago when I started renting a house in Grant Park from him. He had already been working on a sheet metal shelving project and wanted a partner. I went to school for industrial design, so I was naturally interested in furniture and shelving design. I think it took us about a year to get all of our initial designs completed and prototyped as well as launch a Kickstarter campaign.
We were working pretty much just one day a week on it, and there were a few months in there in which one of us or both of us weren’t able to work on Kernel at all. In the end, our Kickstarter campaign was successful (Thanks Backers!), and we were able to start making and shipping our modular shelving system.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Zane – Considering a consumer-facing company was new to both of us when new started, I think it’s been smoother than it could have been. We had to learn how to ship our products which, being made of steel, aren’t very light. We saw some shipping damage in some of the early shipments and had to design a custom shipping crate to protect our shelves from mishandling. To be honest, after the stress of disappointing a few early customers faded, it was fun to design a solution to the problem. We learn as we go along.
Neil – It hasn’t been smooth, but it’s been fun. The biggest challenge for us was marketing because we’re engineers and designers. We’re still figuring it out. We’ve learned a few things about how to propose a project on Kickstarter, how to make a product easier to understand, how to ship heavy objects with sharp edges, and so on. We improve our processes continually.
We’d love to hear more about what you do.
Neil – What we do is make furniture we would recommend to friends, something that looks great and is well-engineered, but also affordable. Our product line looks simple but is full of details we’ve enjoyed developing, details that help in both manufacture and design. We enjoy the reactions of customers and manufacturing partners who experience it in person for the first time.
Zane – One important distinction is that our shelves and desks work together in a wall-mounted system. You can get a couple of shelves or a full wall of shelves, and you can even expand your Kernel shelving over time. I think something that really sets us apart is how we think about our products. It’s actually customer service that drives us to design and make the best products that we can.
The products themselves provide a service, and so does every step of interacting with us as a company. From the start, we were adamant about offering custom sizing and colors to our customers, and I think that gives a good idea of how we think about the intersection between our products and customer service.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Zane – I would have considered looking for investment money. We used Kickstarter to start the company, and it worked out for us, but the right investor might have allowed us to delegate a lot of the stuff we have had to learn and do ourselves and would have had advice for us that we could have used early on. There are benefits to having bootstrapped the company, though. We got to learn in a very hands-on way how each part of our business should work and we still get to make all of our decisions.
Neil – I think we would develop a standalone product rather than a system. It would have been easier to learn how to sell it, we think. This product evolved from a need we had, not a business plan. The business came later. Perhaps, that’s the best way?
Pricing:
- Shipping – FREE
- 24in by 8in Pair of Shelves – $129.00
- 24in by 11in Pair of Shelves – $149.00
- 24in by 14in Pair of Shelves – $159.00
- Kernel Desk with Walnut Armrest- $399.00
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kernelmodular.com
- Phone: (404) 448-1454
- Email: zane@kernelmodular.com
- Instagram: @kernelmodular
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kernelmodular/
Image Credit:
Jamie Hopper
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