We changed our company name from Daily Grommet to The Grommet.  This shift represents a doubling down in our commitment to “Grommet.” As the company has evolved the word “Daily” has become superfluous, while Grommet is enduring.

I chose the word Grommet in 2008 when this company was just a gleam in my eye.  Why?  Those reasons remain equally true today:

• As an industrial designer and product geek, I simply love hardware!  And I have a strong fondness for Grommets in particular. In most applications, like shower curtains, carrying bags, and outdoor gear, Grommets are a humble piece of hardware that simply makes things stronger and better.  And they can have real wit and humor when applied in unexpected places like stationery, and as a decorative texture on apparel.
• The name is like a “wink” to Makers.  Most people don’t know what a Grommet is.  That’s OK!  It made the name all the more appealing to me because that meant we could define it whatever we wanted.  But for a fellow hardware or DIY person, it’s a subtle wink—a little bond and connection.
• Like the hardware, Grommets are products that “make things better” too.  In the case of a new technology or a smart invention, these products can help us in our daily lives.  In the case of a domestically produced Grommet--or one that is manufactured in an impoverished area--they can create needed jobs.  They can preserve a craft, or a quality way of producing a product that is at risk of disappearing. In the case of a company founded by a woman, a young grad, or a senior citizen, they can give lift to an under-represented entrepreneur.  As social enterprises, Grommets can fundamentally improve lives.  As green or sustainable products, they can improve the planet.

Finally, people often call us The Grommet, so we decided to go with the flow.  We like it better too.

It makes us smile to know that the simple act of buying or sharing a Grommet is a truly powerful act.  It empowers us as citizens and consumers to support the companies creating the world we want to live in.

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Jairo is elated to eat frozen yogurt!

My most memorable course at HBS was taught by a young instructor (now professor) named Tom DeLong. It was called Career Management. I liked it for two reasons. First, it was the only self-reflective course I encountered at HBS and it exposed an atypical side of my classmates’ thought processes. Second, Tom was brand new at the school and was somehow less guarded than the average teacher. That made me root for him.

One little exercise for healthy communications Tom shared was an idea to discuss what aspects of a relationship you wanted your partner to “Stop, Start, or Keep.“ It is simple, but very powerful, in the way it balances positive and negative feedback, and because it elegantly and somewhat dispassionately gets to pretty deep ideas.

When Grommet was on the cusp of growing dramatically in Q3 last year, I asked my team that same question. “While it’s just us chickens here, before a whole bunch of new employees show up, what aspects of our culture and behaviors do you want to Stop, Start or Keep?” The team had a lot of Keeps, a lot of Starts but not a lot of Stops. (Actually the lack of Stops worried me…were people holding back?)

I was charmed that one team member, Adam Russell, said, “I want to keep having all the birthdays and celebrations. I really don’t think any big personal event has gone by at Daily Grommet without us taking time to mark it.”

So it was fitting that we took the whole team for frozen yogurt yesterday to help Adam have his own Happy Birthday.

The whole team couldn't be happier for an afternoon frozen yogurt treat!

One of the things I decided to “Start” is a quarterly “Bloody Knee Award.” It was inspired by the Roxanne Quimby quote, “I believe that success is just getting up one more time than you fall” and my own crazy face-plant a couple months ago. I realized that there are always going to be people on our team who might be battling a particularly hard set of circumstances and we should recognize them.

Our first recipient, for Q3 2012, was Julia Kemp. She curates and produces the Grommets and for a period from May to September she single-handedly covered most of our launches (with a key assist from Kate McLeod). This crushing workload occurred right on top of demanding planning her own September wedding. Julia’s extreme contribution and strength in the face of a killer challenge is highlighted by the fact that we now have SIX people covering that same set of responsibilities she handled alone!

So try this. Whether it is with a spouse or a child, or a business partner, or even your whole team. What would you like to Start, Stop or Keep doing?

We're kicking of a new series of quick interviews with people in our community.  They tend to be people who are uber-passionate about the companies and products they support.  So we decided to turn the table and ask them to imagine what they would do if they were on the "creator" side of the equation.  We're calling this series the Grommet Grill.

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Grommet: If you were a product, what would be your tagline?

Whoopi:  You're good to go!

Yesterday at Grommet: Annaliese Godderz, Ray Hallare, me, Jesse Buckley. Ray said, “Aww, it’s my first thank you note at Grommet.”

I’ve always been struck that many technology startups are very, very quiet offices.  No “Mad Man-esque” phones ringing or typewriters clacking and office chitchat.  Not a lot of visitors in and out. Startups usually have open plans and banks of people hunched over computers, silently absorbed in a private headphone stream.  People have told me that open plans can kill conversation…since nothing is private and everything is potentially intrusive to your co-workers.  Beyond that, startup customers don’t often call, and most digital businesses actually work hard to prevent that difficult phone service expense in the first place.  Automation and self-serveare the mantras.  We’re not like that at Grommet.  It’s the loudest startup I’ve ever experienced.

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The single best thing about building Grommet has been watching the ongoing success of our Grommet partners, like Back to the Roots Ventures. The founders are two young guys who came up with the idea to recycle coffee grounds into mushroom growing kits. I took a road trip to visit them at their Oakland CA facility, with my two-year-old nephew Killian in tow. Community outreach is a big part of their ethos at BTTR, so the team was most welcoming to a little boy.

Before our arrival, we negotiated our car around a live police sting operation (seriously) to get to the Back to the Roots office and manufacturing facility. Killian was not impressed with the Oakland Police Department activities, but this little red front loader going into Back to the Roots really got him going.

Our host for the tour, Mai-Ling Garcia, is in charge of their direct to consumer (as opposed to wholesale) operations. She is standing in front of a bunch of BTTR mushroom growing experiments in this photo. I guess you could call this area their R & D lab.

It was fun to see the original Back to the Roots boxes. It’s come a long way! These older versions do not communicate enough value or enable gifting. With Daily Grommet’s video format we can work around compromised packaging, but it is a very real problem when the Grommets get send out “into the wild” to compete on store shelves.

Visible behind the green packages are some cool hydroponic experiments happening. This is part of BTTR’s mission “to make food personal.” I.e. they are working on bringing production into the home in all kinds of ways.

Here is what the Oyster Mushrooms look like at first, and then a couple days later. (Kind of an eerie blue color to begin. Not something you would pop into your mouth on a woodlands ramble.)

This is Nikhil Aurora, co-founder, with the rest of us. (The man sports a constant smile!) I was lucky to catch him, as he had unexpectedly pushed back a trip to D.C. Nikhil was headed there in a few hours because he and his co-founder were scheduled to receive a big deal White House Empact100 List award.

Here’s the reason why Nikhil delayed his trip: he had a last minute command-performance meeting with the Peets Coffee retail team at the BTTR facility. This meant a lot to me because my sister Lisa runs supply chain operations for Peets. In a bit of serendipity last year, I connected her with Nikhil to help BTTR increase its flow of used coffee grounds from Peets’ coffee shops. I love when we can pitch in and help break a log jam for a Grommet partner, by virtue of our networks.

In this clean room is the man who expertly blends the mushroom spores, coffee grounds and growing medium to create each hand-packed kit.

BTTR is on track to hit $5M in revenue in 2012. Their holiday ramp-up is yet to start but here are hundreds of kits “aging” before they are sent out for distribution.

It’s so great to see where these hard-working entrepreneurs have taken such an improbable idea. I look forward to seeing what Nikhil and his co-founder Alejandro Velez do next. Whatever their new product might be, the Grommet community will be very interested.

This is Killian saying goodbye to the BTTR team…who all work out of this same turquoise colored room partitioned off from the production facility.

Finally, here is the original 2011 video we produced about Back to the Roots mushroom growing kits. They keep on selling, the mushrooms keep on growing, and BTTR is really making food personal.

Daily Grommet's team is spread out across three buildings in the center of a prototypical New England town, Lexington, MA.  Our original building, which we still occupy, is a converted Victorian house.  This is me, in front.  My office is on the ground floor and my desk faces the window.

Me, in front of one of the original Grommet office building

I was sitting in my office and saw these people outside.  They piqued my curiosity and I inquired why they were so interested in our building.

Turns out the woman on the right, Ruth Fullerton, lived here for several years as a young bride, after World War II.  She had three babies while she lived here.  My office is her former living room.  Our conference room, where we shoot Grommet videos, is her former kitchen.

This is our landlord Dan with Ruth in our office entry area, her former dining room.

Our company happened to be making big news on the day Ruth took a tour.  She got a big kick out of that, to think she changed diapers and stirred soup in the same location that places like the New York Times (article in the photo behind Dan) and the Wall Street Journal are featuring.

Recently,  Peter Davison shared with us a speech he gave, during which he discussed the current state of crowdsourcing. We were honored to hear Daily Grommet mentioned (at around 10:06 of video) and to be included in Peter's TEDx speech.

As Peter points out, some of the early iterations of crowdsourcing, like getting a graphic design project created at 99Designs, are just  scratching the surface of this cultural and technical advance.  He recognized that at Grommet we are building a powerful crowdsourced platform for deeply impacting the most central of all business activities:  discovering and launching products.  Until we pulled various technologies and media together, most new products were left to the wild to survive.  They would often die before getting discovered.  It was just plain unfair and wasteful that the playing field for innovation was not level.

Now that we have built a way for an entire global crowdsourcing community to surface viable and inspiring products and even whole new companies.  Once launched on Daily Grommet they have a great fighting chance and are achieving great success.
We are grateful that Peter Davison, as a domain expert, recognized the impact of what we are building, via crowdsourcing.

Daily Grommet is mentioned at 10:06

One of the coolest things about mentoring another person is that they often force you to new realizations and insights.  This happened to me recently when I had a meeting with a 19-year-old Harvard freshman named Sam Peinado.  We met at a talk given by Reid Hoffman (Founder of PayPal and LinkedIn).  The audience was largely students.  Sam caught my eye because he went toe to toe with Reid  during the Q and A, with insightful questions and even some push-backs on one of Reid's answers.  I liked his mind, and I was amused by his feisty style.

Sam subsequently visited me at Grommet and asked a very original question.  "As a designer, and now start-up person, how do you come up with your ideas?"  He wasn't asking about Daily Grommet, per se.  He was asking about my general process.

I hadn't thought about that for a long time and I gave what felt like a very lame answer:  "Well I just observe a lot.  I'm very curious.  Then I try concepts out and start to look for, or create, data that supports these ideas."  The student probed: "You are curious about what? Observe what? What kind of data?"

And I was forced to think harder:   "I read constantly--a mix of consumer and business publications.  I watch what urban kids say, what they do, what they wear--since they control many trends.  Same with moms, since they control the economy.   I look at cultural sentiments going mainstream--this used to be signalled via greeting cards but now I watch that kind of stuff on Pinterest.  Beyond general observations, I study new technologies.  I see patterns forming.  In a weird way, I often sense I am seeing the future.  I know what people are going to care about and I understand what is going to be possible to execute."

But I also admitted that I don't always know the optimum timing, and that is the hard part of committing to a breakthrough idea.

Anyway, I recently saw an interview with Clayton Christensen in my HBS alumni Bulletin where he answered the question "Can People Learn to be More Innovative?"  Short answer:  Some can.  Not all.  Christensen asserts that there are five discovery skills essential to innovation.  Here are some of his conclusions on how to be a good innovator:

First and foremost, innovators are good at associational thinking, or simply associating. They make connections between seemingly unrelated problems and ideas and synthesize new ideas. I would frame associational thinking by asking this question: Has somebody else in the world solved a problem like this before? It turns out that most problems have been solved before by somebody in a different environment. Associating that other experience to what’s going on in my world may make me look brilliant, but in reality my brilliance was in seeing that this had been solved elsewhere.

Observing and questioning go hand in glove. Innovators observe things, then question why. If you want to be an innovative person, when you see things, you have to pay attention and then wonder why.

Networking is a skill that innovators use to identify and develop ideas by spending time with a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and experiences. By engaging with others, innovators increase the probability that they are going to gain useful insights.

Finally, innovators are constantly experimenting. The critical insight here is that for whatever reason, when God created the world, he made data only available about the past. As teachers at HBS, we’re trained to nail students to the wall if they ever make an assertion in class discussion that is not backed up with data and evidence in the case. So our students come out of here with this elevated respect for data-driven, fact-based, analytical decision-making.

The problem is that data are only available about the past. If you’re trying to be innovative, and you have this data-driven mindset, you can’t go forward. So experimenting essentially says, “I don’t want to wait until somebody provides data. I need to get out there and create data.

So if student Sam is ever enterprising enough to meet Clayton Christensen, he can get this kind of stuff straight from the source.  The funny part is that academics like Christensen, and Jim Collins at Stanford, are excellent observers of creativity and leadership, but they completely deny having their own abilities in those areas.

So Sam is still going to be stuck hanging around with less incisive and less articulate people like me, kind of like watching gorillas in the mist, and trying to figure out what makes them tick.

"I never pay retail."

"You wouldn't believe what a deal I got on this."

"I'll wait until it goes on sale."

If you are talking about last season's clothes, or giant boxes of Cheerios, or a car, or a great product in an unpopular color, or a laptop model that is about to be upgraded, these are reasonable positions.  There are huge categories of products that have margin structures and lifecycles that support deep and regular discounts.  You ARE a sap if you don't get the best price you can.

But if you are also the kind of person who loves new technology, or getting your hands on the latest clever invention, or you want to support sustainable products or entrepreneurs just getting started, or you appreciate having vibrant local (and even big chain) stores in your town or city, discounts become a much more complicated conversation.  Why?

Mainly because new products and/or young companies have not reached a scale or efficiency to immediately begin discounting.  If anything, at Grommet, we see too many entrepreneurs underpricing their products.  This has two effects.  Either they can't cover their costs.  Or, if they are selling direct, they are setting a market price that does not allow for scaling via other retailers who need to make their own margin.  Either outcome spells death.

When it comes to online discounts, there's another level of complication.  Namely, "showrooming."

The television industry is recently fighting the pervasive discounts threatening both the manufacturers and retailers like Best Buy and Target.  Last week Sony and Samsung announced unprecedented new pricing policies--taking a page out of the Apple playbook.  "If you want to carry our product, you have to respect our prices." The Wall Street Journal did a nice job covering this news.  Here's an excerpt that pretty much covers it:

"This allows us to make a reasonable profit," says Billy Abt, co-president of Abt Electronics, one of the country's largest independent consumer electronics retailers. "It got to the point where we were selling $2,000 TVs and making $10."

Even a fourth-grader can do the math on that one.  Now it's time for the adults who control our economy (you and me) to stop deluding ourselves that someone else is paying for these unsustainable discounts.  We are all paying when we kill whole industries and our local retail.

What are your thoughts on the topic?

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The just-released Mojo professional grade 3-D printer by Stratsys. It’s available for $9,999, or by lease for $189/mo.The just-released Mojo professional grade 3-D printer by Stratsys. It’s available for $9,999, or by lease for $189/mo.

Ever since I saw a 3-D printer available for a $15/hour at a college design lab, I've been convinced of its eventual ubiquity.  Remember when only universities and large companies had mainframe computers?  Remember when you went to a professional shop to get something printed?  3-D printing is on the same trajectory--but for physical products.

Right now, 80% of the materials consumed for 3-D printing are being used for prototyping.  In other words, it's still in the land of universities, big companies, hackers, and the military.  (And, coincidentally, Jay Leno has one in his garage for fabricating parts for his classic car collection.)

But I predict that by 2020 we will be downloading products to home printers as easily as we print out emails or buy a song on i-Tunes.

I've been writing about this for a long time.  Notably, so has been the normally unexcitable Economist.  (Here's my summary of one of the best Economist pieces.) The press corps is getting on the bandwagon.  VC's are funding upstarts in the space.  Daily Grommet is creating a business model that gives all this upcoming innovative product supply a place to get launched.

But it's also interesting to see how the Motley Fool outlines the investment opportunity being created by 3-D printing.  They equate investing in the space now to investing in Apple in 1980 or Microsoft in 1986. I know they are selling a publication that pushes stocks...but their investment thesis for the 3-D printing space strikes me as solid and perfectly understandable.

Here's a fast-paced, but extended, Motley Fool video on the topic.

And here is a transcript of the same video.

If you can't be Daily Grommet and build a whole business around this new industrial revolution, an investment in the 3-D Printing space seems like a pretty good idea to me.