Peanut Butler® Mixing Hook - Story Part Two
Our Story Part Two:
The Peanut Butler® is a master of engineering and design.
Mom Stacey Venables sought out top engineers to help make the PEANUT BUTLER® a reality.
After Stacey Venables came up with the idea for the PEANUT BUTLER® three-years-ago, she admits a few doubts began to creep in.
“I sat on it for three months and thought, am I up for this?” says Stacey who started working on the PEANUT BUTLER® in 2018. “I asked a million people what they thought of it. It happened to be baseball season so I had a captive audience with all the moms and dads at the ballpark and I asked everyone their opinion. Everyone said, you might be on to something Stacey, I’d buy one. And others would say, ‘OMG yes, please invent it, I feed my kids the other peanut butter, but would switch over if I didn’t have to deal with the oil!’”
Stacey says she took a lot of good-natured ribbing about the PEANUT BUTLER® name and adds even an emergency-room doctor chimed in with, “Go for it Stacey, it’s just too good of a name to give up.” She felt that the name PEANUT BUTLER® chose her. After all, Butlers do all the hard work for you, something that was a natural fit for this concept. Finally, with encouragement from her husband and best friend, Stacey decided to jump into the world of inventing feet first.
Stacey then designed the logo, reserved the domain names, peanutbutler.com and peanutbutler.ca, and then, just like every other baseball mom does, started reaching out to engineers and sourcing manufacturers from around the world. Comforting to consumers, Stacey learned that in order to sell a product or device, you need safety approvals. The head engineer for the leading product safety company stated “I love this idea.” Stacey asked “what do you love about it?” and he responded “I’ve been in this business for over 25 years and I see hundreds of products come over my desk on a daily basis, and I’ve never seen one of these before, that’s why.”
“I spent endless hours sourcing manufacturers in Canada, the U.S. and China, and made hundreds of phone calls and sent hundreds of emails,” says Stacey. “I quickly realized after about 10 months of sourcing, I’d have to engineer my own locking mechanism and hook. It just did not exist in the form that I needed. But, before I got to the custom design, I thought, I need to consult an invention professional about protection.”
Once Stacey had the PEANUT BUTLER® logos nailed down, early engineer drawings, and consumption statistics, she presented her idea to the Vancouver office of patent company Innovative Licencing and Promotion Inc.
“They flipped when they saw it,” says Stacey. “First of all, they wanted one. Secondly, the size of the market — huge! And I was immediately passed on to owner Vince Kehoe for a follow-up phone call regarding patenting and trademarking.”
Buoyed by the enthusiastic encouragement of the team at Innovative about the PEANUT BUTLER®, Stacey left that meeting feeling her first real surge of excitement and admits to jumping up and down “just a little” after leaving the office.
Meanwhile, the hard work continued and Stacey contacted almost 30 manufacturers, something she describes as being the most time-consuming and frustrating of the entire process. She eventually found two, which provided excellent support and engineering feedback.
Stacey needed these experts to modify an immersion blender and manufacture her newly designed hook with thinner and longer coils, plus a filleted spatula tip. She says while one expert was excited about her vision, the other one was not, so her manufacturing partner decision was easy.“ And I’m glad, because I’ve landed in the hands of the best design engineer money can buy,” says Stacey. “My design engineer and I communicate with information and business followed by a smiling emoji! That’s my style.They also believe in my vision that PEANUT BUTLER® is the solution for mixing in all types of natural nut butter — peanut, almond, cashew, macadamia and tahini as well. We hope everyone at home will love the PEANUT BUTLER® as much as we do.”