“There has to be a better way!”
Some years ago, Cedar Anderson went down to one of his beehives, which he knew was pretty wild.
He put on the bee veil his grandma made him and pressed the gaffer tape back on the mesh that covered the rips in it. Then I put on his only glove, fired up the smoker and blew plenty of smoke into the hive. The bees weren’t happy about being disturbed, the hive was packed with bees and it was near impossible to get the honey out without squashing lots of them. The bees became grumpier and started to sting him through his beekeeper suit.
He put the hive back together as quickly as he could, squashing more bees as the lid went on and thought, “There has to be a better way!”
So, he and his dad, Stuart, set to work on the task of inventing the beekeeper’s dream. After years of experimenting they came up with a 3D printed prototype that worked! But, as any successful entrepreneur will tell you, it’s what you do next that counts. They looked into where it could be manufactured commercially and what it would cost to get it off the ground. After first assuming China would be the place, they eventually realised they could look closer to home.
“We got quotes from Australia, quotes from China, quotes from America, and we realised that Australia can be quite competitive on a worldwide scale. That tickled us pink; how fantastic that we can get out there and have an Australian-made product and support Australian manufacturing and more jobs in Australia.”
Then came the matter of funding the enterprise. Instead of a bank loan or grant they opted for an online crowd-funding approach.
“The target was $70,000 and we reached in 2 minutes.”
They put a promotional video up on Facebook which got 1.8 million views in a week.
Cedar set the funding target at $US70,000 but, based on the number of people who viewed the video, hoped he might crack the $US1 million mark. The actual result far exceeded expectations.
“I knew we’d be busy trying to manufacture and deliver hives, but there were lots of things we didn’t expect and one was that we’d be getting a thousand emails a day for months on end,” Mr Anderson said. “In the end these are our amazing customers [who] jumped in early to support our invention.”
His dad, Stuart, added; “being rich isn’t so important, but not having to worry about money is lovely, yeah.”