Battery packaging technology no one uses in consumer appliances and half-horsepower motors, BlenderCap is one of the most ridiculously over-engineered products we’ve ever seen in a hot minute. In CES in Las VegasWe took a closer look when talking to the team behind the product to learn more.
Let’s start with, why do we need a hand blender in the first place?
“We originally invented this just for personal use to make smoothies after the gym. I was going to CrossFit and then I wanted a protein shake. “I make myself a shake, and it almost melts and clumps after you’ve exercised for an hour or two,” says Dakota Adams, the company’s co-founder. “Then the idea of putting blenders on top of these Hydroflask-style bottles came up. Matthew [Moore] and I became friends and started researching how to pack that technology into a tiny hat.”
At the time, the duo was building a battery factory for Apple in China, while also working on blenders. About a year ago, the duo left their jobs at Apple to make BlenderCap a reality. In the process, they created a great blender.
BlendCap kit, showing its custom PCB and pin soldered directly to the board. Image credits: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
“WI discovered that you can make a margarine smoothie. During testing, we completed an entire Costco ice pack on a single charge. You can do 10 in a row,” laughs Adams. “We filled a 5-gallon Home Depot margarine. That means in real life, instead of charging it every day, you charge it once a week or every two weeks.”
Battery technology is the company’s forte, and the founders have finally adopted custom batteries with technology that is starting to appear in next-generation electric vehicles.
The blender lid weighs about a pound and is super simple: There’s only one button. Press and hold to mix or double click to mix for 25 seconds. It charges using USB-C, and the company decided to use the same threading that Hydroflask uses, which means it’s compatible with a large number of thermos flasks that many already own.
“We sell it as a set – it comes with a double-walled stainless steel 32-ounce vacuum-insulated bottle and is dishwasher safe. It comes with a BlenderCap, blade cap, and dual screw cap, turning the wide mouth bottle into a smoothie mouth,” said Matthew Moore, the company’s other co-founder. “It charges via USB-C and you can buy it for $129”
It is not possible to buy the blender lid yourself; The company says that’s because it’s trying to keep sales under control.
This is where the magic sauce is stored. In this case, the “magic sauce” is clearly electric. Image credit: TechCruch / Haje Kamps
“In the future we will probably offer it on its own or with different sized bottles etc., using more mounting methods. Currently, to limit the number of SKUs and simplify the launch, we are only selling a single set,” explains Moore. “We found that a single 32-ounce bottle was what most people wanted during initial testing.”
Pre-orders for the kit opened on January 4, and deliveries will begin late next month. The company says its products are already in production; it just needs to figure out the logistics to get it here.
their own factory
Perhaps unusually, Cruz has his own factory that builds BlenderCap.
“WWe are renting factory space at a really high end manufacturer in Shanghai and we own all the equipment and robots that build this factory. So we actually have on our assembly line – we designed the entire assembly line – and we have more robots than people putting them together,” Adams said. “It’s crazy. There’s the glue dispensing robot, the automatic screw-driver. It’s beautiful. To be honest, it’s a bit aspirational. And we’re really excited to have our own dedicated factory. .”
For the first batch, the company is producing 6,000 BlenderCaps and is pushing for sustainable production.
Everything is custom. Because why not hell. Image credits: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps
The company claims that it will be profitable from day one and has already begun looking at what the next generation of products could be. We asked, but the company isn’t willing to share what’s next.
“We’re about to have a secret product,” Adams laughs. “Obviously, this battery technology can go into a lot of different devices and we have the entire product roadmap and are excited to build an ecosystem around what we have here. those are other new consumer products. One of the things that we observe in the market, is that all these DTC brands in the last 10 years have basically just rebranded for cheap Chinese goods products, lots of plastic covers and just trash. We have this design philosophy that we’ve grown up with at Apple for 10 years that really puts our heart and soul into our products. So we have a lot of products that follow the same philosophy: minimalism, super premium materials. From there, we’ll see where it goes.”
