Thanks to an enterprising Pacific Beach couple, a better household flytrap may be on a store shelf near you soon.
Dennis and Joylyn Darnell have spent two years developing and marketing a new product named the Garbage Can Fly Trap, marketed at Hammer & Nails Ace Hardware at 890 Turquoise St.
“The owners said OK for that to be our first retail location,” said Dennis adding, “as soon as our (first) shipment clears customs (in L.A.) we’ll stock his store. It will basically be a pilot for us.”
“We’re excited to help local inventors get their first product on the shelves,” said PB Ace Hardware owner Ron Roman. “Even better if it solves a local problem.”
Inventing a product, testing and marketing it, getting all the necessary permitting and licensing, copywriting it as well as finding a Chinese manufacturing site, has all been a real learning experience for both Darnells.
“We knew it would be a challenge – and it was,” said Dennis.
“The packaging, the graphics, the design, the content – it’s just constantly been working and re-working, learning, receiving feedback from (potential) customers,” said Joylyn. “We’re excited to (finally) get it out there.”
The Darnells were sitting in their North PB kitchen a couple of years ago when Dennis, an engineering graduate from UC San Diego, had the proverbial “light bulb” go off over his head.
“Dennis really hates flies,” noted Joylyn, an SDSU marketing graduate. She pointed out Dennis had “tinkered” with developing flytraps previously, and that they both had become irritated noticing flies walking around the rim of their indoor garbage cans trying to get in. Dennis went to a home appliance store that very night to buy parts to construct his better flytrap.
A year later, the couple had a patent pending for their “Garbage Can Fly Trap.” They then launched a fundraising campaign on kickstarter.com to get prospective buyers to help them launch early development of their new household flytrap.
Dennis noted the couple was successful in their Kickstarter campaign, raising $13,000 in pre-orders for the Garbage Can Fly Trap.
District 2 Councilwoman Lorie Zapf was one of the Darnell’s Kickstarter pre-orderers.
“She’s the one who put us over the top,” Dennis said.
With Kickstarter funds, the Darnells hired a local engineering firm to optimize trap design for injection molding.
The pair said UC San Diego student Du Chen from China reached out to them about her parent’s manufacturing firm, which the Darnells, with their 3-year-old son Dakota in tow, visited in May.
Subsequently, the Darnell’s reduced their 24-piece fly trap design down to a 4-piece, plastic injected molded version. Their first shipment of 500 fly traps and 3,000 cartridges just arrived and will be transported to San Diego.
Dennis is also working on an “industrial size” fly trap to go in dumpsters, but added he and Joylyn are just focused on their garbage can prototype for now.
All that’s needed to install the Garbage Can Fly Trap is to bore a small hole with a drill into the side of the garbage can, and the plastic trap cartridge lined with fly paper just pops right in.
The Darnells also conducted a pilot test with local residents for the city of San Diego, which has determined their invention works, and said it’s OK to modify curbside cans to incorporate their trap into the lids.
Is this the end of product invention and development for the Darnells?
No way, said Joylyn, noting Dennis already is working on something new, something totally unrelated to the fly trap – though he won’t disclose exactly what it is. Yet.
For more information, www.garbagecanflytrap.com.