Macworld was a big success for my budsock project. We sold enough of them on the show floor to nearly cover the booth costs, which was far beyond what I expected. My hope was to meet some people and get traction with distributors and retail (side-note: we did), and perhaps sell a few on the show floor. That’s exciting! The most important feedback we got was along the lines of: “This is one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. I’ll take 3.” It ended up giving some validation to my relentless commitment to “function over form”, but also validated what many of those closest to me had said, which is that the lack of “design beauty” in the product is holding it back. With that in mind, I’ve started the process of designing version 3 of the budsock. I’ve enlisted Noah Guy, an extremely talented San Francisco-based designer (who also happens to be quite fond of cool gadgets) to lead the design process. I’m excited to see what comes of it.

As I’ve been thinking about the design and accumulating feedback from lots of people, as well as thinking about my purpose (which you can read more about here), I’ve decided that I want budsock v3 to, as much as possible, be an “upcycled” product. While in v1 and v2 I was pretty committed to the idea of “no plastics” and “organic fabric”, a recent conversation has led me to believe that I’d be better off turning some of the thousands of thousands of “waste” plastic bottles that get thrown away into something that saves people time and makes them happy. Although I haven’t spoken to Noah about it yet, I plan to push him toward upcycling with his design.

Onward and upward. Stay tuned, budsock fans …