After a busy day, most people would like to rest while enjoying drinks. But for Tom Osborne and his long-term friend Mike Robb, they couldn’t take anything apart from beer. It was their style of relaxing their mind. The warm drink was taking away their daily stress.
For most of their free moments, Tom Osborn will suggest that they move away from the company’s office. But, as time went by, they were not happy with the warm beer. The 80-degree beer was killing their buzz on a sunny day.
After brainstorming how we could control the warm beer, the only option was to come up with our sample. I was looking for a good solution to keep our drinks as cold as possible, even without a freezer or refrigerator. Sometimes the invention is through trial and error, so we kept trying. Finally, the beer Blizzard came up.
The hydra-gel cube can freeze faster than water. Aluminum tin can accommodate a rounded battle of any warm beverage and keep it cold within minutes. The drink will then remain at that low temperature until you finish drinking.
Together with my co-founder Mike Robb, we are very excited about this solution. Solving problems in society has been my dream since I was a kid. The beer bottles are shipped in the same style in Brazil, Pennsylvania, Africa, or England. That means a solution for a single beer will be the same as the rest.
In 2014, we tried our product in the market, and the output was good. We won awards like the Gold Medal at Invention & New Product Exposition in the technical design category. Afterward, we noticed many people making their orders. Unfortunately, we raised only $5000 during the pre-seed season to support 10,000 units only. After that, different investors approached us, and we were ready to sell some shares. We got almost $43000 as pledges from over 2000 people. But we could not take all those ventures because we wanted some ownership.
In 2015, we got a chance to talk on the Shark Tank show. We arrived at the stage, both of us wearing jeans with a Beer Blizard t-shirt. But, of course, that was casual, and we managed to share our deep story on how we came up with the idea. I was the Chief Redneck in Charge, while Mike was the CEO at that moment.
In the interviewee, we went with samples of Beer Blizard, which we distributed to the panel. Everyone was happy. Lori brought out some difficult questions, but we made everything look easier. Our humor caught their attention.
At the Shark Tank, we asked for $100,000 to support our projects in return for 20% of the total shares. We had planned to expand our inventory and the manufacturing grounds. This was a strategy to increase our profit. Fortunately, one of the panelists vowed to help us distribute our product to the retailers to increase our markets.
After the show, our business was on top of the world. Our sales increased within a fortnight. Our ice cube cans were all over Bed Bath, Target, Walmart, and other large retail stores. That gave us the motivation to keep pushing harder. We came up with other products like the army man bottle opener that were easy to use.
Years have passed since we got a good deal with bottle company Dale Earnhardt. We tried to apply our product to their military operations, and it brought some issues. The company was then absorbed by a private organization. Unfortunately, if you search now, you will find it has been a blizzard as a free domain name that doesn’t exist in servers.
But it was very fun working for our company. To all entrepreneurs, find something that solves the problem in society. A daily problem would be better. Then, be ready to create a product that can act as a blueprint to show it to investors.
To a younger Tom Osborn, time moves faster. So anything you have now, enjoy. No one knows what will happen tomorrow.
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