Growth Mavericks

What happens when a product designer who’s built 100+ products a year decides to bet on himself?
You get Elevated Craft—a brand born from engineering precision, relentless iteration, and a wildly successful Kickstarter that broke $2M in pre-sales before manufacturing even scaled.

In this episode of Growth Mavericks, Adam Callinan sits down with Adam Craft to unpack a startup story that flips the traditional playbook.
Instead of solving a personal problem, Adam engineered a category.
Instead of guessing demand, he modeled it mathematically.
And instead of playing it safe, he launched during COVID with newborn twins at home.

💡 What You’ll Learn
  •  How Adam designed a “category creation” strategy (not just a product) 
  •  Why he started with brand first, product second
  •  The exact thinking behind a $500K Kickstarter → $2M+ total raise
  •  How to use “brute force math” to validate startup risk 
  •  Why perceived value > cost of goods in pricing strategy 
  •  The reality of launching hardware during COVID supply chain chaos 
  •  How communication builds trust (and saves failing launches) 
  •  Why constraints and reps matter more than shortcuts in entrepreneurship 
🧠 Key Takeaways
  • You don’t need a problem—just a better system.
  • Category creation = pricing power.
  • Kickstarter is validation + distribution + capital (if done right).
  • Your first 1,000 customers determine your trajectory.
  • Execution under pressure builds real founders.
🔗 Resources & Links
🎧 Episode Breakdown
  • 00:00 – From industrial design to entrepreneurship 
  • 06:00 – Why Adam restarted college for the right path 
  • 14:00 – Building a product pipeline (100 products/year) 
  • 20:00 – The “category creation” strategy 
  • 26:00 – Kickstarter launch playbook 
  • 30:00 – COVID chaos + supply chain survival 
  • 40:00 – Patents, competition, and brand moat 
  • 45:00 – Founder mindset, balance, and resilience 

Creators and Guests

Host
Adam Callinan
Adam Callinan is the founder of Pentane, a financial and advertising command center that empowers brands to drive predictable revenue and intentional profit. Previously, Adam co-founded BottleKeeper, a bootstrapped consumer brand that scaled to $8M in sales within three years – without employees – and was later acquired in 2021 as an eight-figure business with a team of four, marking Adam's second successful exit.

What is Growth Mavericks?

This podcast dives deep into the tactical moves that drive business success, as well as the mental and physical resilience required to sustain it.

Hosted by Adam Callinan, a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple exits, an avid outdoorsman, and an family man with crystal-clear priorities, each episode unpacks real-world challenges, actionable insights, and the mental and physical disciplines that fuel long-term personal and professional growth.

Whether you’re scaling a startup or refining your mindset, disrupting your default is how business and life strike a balance.

Adam Callinan (00:54)
So what does it look like when a product designer with patents on cancer research tools and a bunch of work on the garment in reach decides to put everything on a cocktail shaker? That is what we get in today with Adam Kraft, the founder of Elevated Craft. Adam spent years as an industrial designer with two degrees from Arizona State University and ended up at the point where he was building these products for other companies, cranking out hundreds of designs a year.

and the whole time recognizing that he wanted to build and own his own brand. So the way that he approached startup was very different than the typical approach to startup. Usually we have a problem, we solve our own problem. Turns out other people have that same problem. We start selling our solution to those people and boom, we have a company. He approached it from an entirely different direction, which is really unique or really scientific sort of method in getting to the point of startup. So.

He launched that company on Kickstarter in 2019, which is right at the beginning of COVID. He had brand new twins at home and they crushed that Kickstarter campaign, which was a very designed outcome. They did half a million dollars on Kickstarter and then turned that over to Indiegogo for a total of over $2 million in sales, like before they had even really made the product. It's really incredible. And that's amidst all the COVID shutdowns and hardship that came with.

creating product during that time, much less launching an entirely new brand. So it's a really, really interesting conversation and a spin on startup and building from an engineering mindset, a really creative engineering mindset that is particularly unique. Let's get into it.

Adam Craft (02:31)
So I went to school for industrial design, then had a little bit of ⁓ a segue, worked in industrial design, got to peek behind the curtain a little bit, did some trips to China all through Southeast Asia and everything. And it was during the great ⁓ financial recession or whatever was happening in 2008. And

Adam Callinan (02:49)
Yeah.

Adam Craft (02:51)
And all my friends were getting industrial design jobs and making like, you know, $38,000 a year. And I was just completely tired of being poor, being a poor college student. Cause I had, I had done all kinds of side hustles in college to make pretty decent money. And I was like, man, I've peeked behind the curtain. I know what it means to be an industrial designer at these companies and it's super cool, but I need to make some money. I, ⁓ I actually got out of design for like four or five years doing more.

Adam Callinan (02:59)
Okay.

Adam Craft (03:19)
basically doing sales in Texas. And then after that, got, I just had the itch that I needed to get back into making things. You know, it was definitely not satisfying just to be doing something just for money. And so in 2013 or 2014, I moved back to Arizona, started a design engineering consultancy with a partner. And then we built that over five or six years. And like I saying, had all kinds of clients from

toy companies to medical device companies to water bottle companies, ⁓ which is actually where I might've met you. Cause I was, when I met you at the OR show, I was still doing product design. And so anytime I'd see somebody with a vacuum insulated product, I was like, I've, I've worked on some of those. Let me talk to this guy. Maybe they need some work done, but yeah, that's kind of how it started before. Before I started Elevated Craft, was just designing stuff for other people and

Adam Callinan (04:05)
Yeah.

Adam Craft (04:17)
One client we were on retainer for doing 100 products a year. So it was like a factory of just concept. That was a concept design part, but it would be literally, you know, 10 products a month. Pretty much was the pace and going to China all the time for him and stuff. So, ⁓ I put in the reps before starting my own brand. That was the, that was the goal. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was fun though. I did.

Adam Callinan (04:20)
Wow.

That's a lot of products, 10 products a month. So when you were in college, you went to ASU. Is that right? Okay.

We don't need to talk about the fact that I went to U of A. When you were getting that degree, were you getting the degree because you loved that field or wanted to practice in that practice and you just didn't have visibility into what the industry looked like? Or did you kind of follow into it on accident?

Adam Craft (04:48)
Heh.

Yeah, fell into it on accident. I didn't know that industrial design was a degree. So I started off thinking, and for the first two years I was like, well, I'll just be a mechanical engineer. I always liked to build stuff. And, you know, from the time I was like four, I built like a piece of the equivalent of like a piece of Ikea furniture by myself. My parents came out and like, what, like, how did you do this? It was like, that's just the way my brain worked. It's liking to put stuff together. And then in high school, I was really good in art.

And so those things kind of crossed over. But then I got to college and I literally did not know that industrial design was a, like that you could be a product designer as a career. So I thought mechanical engineering did that for like two years. And then my brother saw a flyer in the design school of, with a description of what industrial design was. And they had kind of, you know, kids were designing shoes and doing all this stuff. I'm like, changing my major. That's it. And it's a, it was a four year degree that,

that you couldn't use any of your previous like you had all the studio time. So I just started college over. So I was like two, two and a half years in, I just started college over, but it did allow me to get two degrees. But it was, yeah, it was one of the greatest decisions I've ever made in getting that exposure there and happening to be at a school that actually had an industrial design program that was pretty good. They only accepted like 40 students a year. And so it was a good program, but.

Adam Callinan (06:27)
So you moved away from, mean, mechanical engineering is very heavily mathematical science. And so moving into industrial, I would imagine was a lot more arts and creativity focused than the maths and the

Adam Craft (06:34)
Right.

Yeah,

yeah, for sure. I mean, we had to take, you know, physics and different, different things to kind of ground us, but it was, it was much more around design principles and a lot of CAD work too. So that was kind of the crossover where, you know, as I was getting into the engineering, the mechanical engineering side, it's like, they weren't making anything. You know, I don't know if maybe in the master's program, they started getting studio classes, but there was like, it was all theoretical.

Adam Callinan (06:58)
Bye.

Adam Craft (07:12)
And so this was much more hands on. So I was able to use my engineering brain for thinking through those things. And especially whenever you get into CAD modeling, that was, uh, you know, heavy on that. And so it was veering kind of away from the artistic side, figuring out what it meant to, know, what good design was, um, which I can't maybe by my last project senior year, I could say like, Oh, that kind of clicked. Cause I just made a bunch of crappy stuff the whole time. And I was learning, you know, I was just like putting in the, putting in the time.

Adam Callinan (07:42)
Yeah, that's a really cool way to get, know, out of, would say it maybe took you a little bit longer to get out of school than was intended or desired. But the balance of like that heavy fundamental mathematical infrastructure, physics based infrastructure, compounded by the artistic creative side is super cool. I mean, you don't hear about that. That's really rare. It's generally, it's one or the other. It's never both.

Adam Craft (08:06)
Yeah, yeah, I was ⁓ thankful that the degree exists. And that is also a Bachelor of Science. So was more kind of science based. Because some some programs can be lean into more fine art based. But this is I was I was a decent art student, but I wasn't like phenomenal. So was kind of like a decent design student. I got better over time. And then ⁓ by senior year, I landed a really good internship at this brand called Boone, Bo in they

I don't know which year they sold, but they were making baby gear and they would do the trade shows a lot. I was, ⁓ me and another guy were their first interns. It was like the coveted position everybody applied for at the design school. Me and this other guy got it. He was qualified very much in that he was really into toy design. And so he could sort of meld that over. And on my end, think the founder just saw how scrappy I was. And she's like, he'll just do anything for, you know, to make, to make the designs cool, to go to trade shows, do whatever. So that's kind of where I got that first.

peek behind the behind the curtain of, you know, what it meant to figure out planograms for Target. And, you know, we would 3D print stuff, and put it in a packaging and fake it and then she would go pitch it to Target and wouldn't even exist yet. You know, it was like this really cool time for for watching those things happen in an office of, you know, six people or something. And, ⁓ and then, you know, went on from there after graduating. But it was a good experience.

Adam Callinan (09:33)
Heck yeah. mean, this is, there's a lot to be, to be taken and gleaned from this. we kind of cover it a little bit earlier in that it's all about the reps. It's literally like, there are no shortcuts. There's not a fast, you know, hack to the thing. It's really just a matter of the reps and taking the time and dedicating to it for as long as it takes.

Adam Craft (09:52)
Yeah,

I think too, like recognizing when you're in a good place and you can make some sacrifice. in that, you know, I was, I was already, I don't know how old I was. was like in my late twenties or something by the time I'm graduating and I'm working an internship making like 12, $14 an hour. And it goes from like three months to six months to like nearly a year. And I'm doing trade shows and everything else, but other friends were getting jobs. And, uh, I thought.

this exposure is worth it. And it was and it totally was. so same with the design engineering consultancy. Whenever I had that, it was kind of feast or famine. But, whenever we get the exposure with with working on a project and getting to see kind of a peek behind the scenes like we did the Garmin inReach device, we worked on that original one. It was at a time. Yeah, yeah, it was that was like, probably one of our first big

Adam Callinan (10:44)
Roy.

Adam Craft (10:49)
jobs. Garmin in the process of doing that, Garmin bought another company, an old map making company. So the inReach started out in another company's hands. So they're technically the ones that hired us, but during the process Garmin bought them and transitioned over. But that was crazy. mean, this is just starting this design engineering consultancy. This, we were hitting up US manufacturers to try to get leads. So we'd just literally walk in and be like, Hey, we'd

We design stuff. you have any crazy inventors that walk in, send them our way because we know you don't want to deal with these guys. And somebody sent us the Garmin inReach opportunity. We put together a quote and I think our original quote was like $20,000 or $12,000 or something. And they literally sent it back and they're like, this isn't enough. Like, you don't know what you're doing. Like you literally, because we were just like, we're like, okay.

Adam Callinan (11:39)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Craft (11:44)
let's charge like $60 an hour and then we'll put like, you know, 100 hours into this and then we'll double it and you know, whatever it was. And they literally sent it back. They're like, you guys obviously don't know what you're doing, but they saw something in us that we were, well, maybe the cheapest option and that they could just, they had all their in-house engineers too. So it was design focus with just coming up with like, you know, we were sort of the extra.

Adam Callinan (11:51)
Yeah.

Adam Craft (12:11)
the extras on the bench when everybody else was like, didn't want to do that project. But it turned out, you my business partner ended up going to Taiwan and building the molds for them. And the same features that we designed back then are in the newest inReach, how the SOS ⁓ door works and different things. So yeah, that was sweet. mean, it was, we definitely underbid it. There's no doubt about that. And had no idea what we were doing, but the risk was like, well, we're selling time. You know, I think like,

At end of that first year, we did that project. We did a handful more and we both paid ourselves like $48,000, you know, and I'm like, and we're like, yes, but yeah, but but it was fine. You know, we had we had saved up money and it was we were literally just like, we got to get the experience and and that's where it started. You know, and that was like 2013 2014. But. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (12:47)
Rich! Yeah, that's amazing.

That's epic. We have, I mean,

I live in Montana and I spent a lot of time in the woods in the back country and my inReach Mini 2 is a critical part of my back country pack. And I can tell you that that trap door that you created has only been opened one time. And it was by one of my kids in the garage who pushed the button and then his shirt showed up. And I didn't know, was like cops showing up in my house all of a sudden. were like, thought somebody got kidnapped. They had to do a full house search because one of my kids.

Adam Craft (13:11)
Yeah.

geez.

Amazing

Adam Callinan (13:29)
turn it off and push the pretty. It worked. It worked. Did what it was supposed to do.

Adam Craft (13:32)
technology. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was a that was definitely a cool thing. And then, yeah, the CAD modeling behind that was intense because it involved the co molded TPU outside and a hard substrate and figuring out the molding and stuff. And that was that was really where my business partner at the time, I knew I could do a lot of the heavy lifting on the design leading into it. But he had already he had been doing

more on the engineering side for, I don't know, eight years before that doing medical devices. And so we kind of paired up and made it work. But you know, we had no right to be hired by them. That's for sure. We made it work. But yeah, they were they were definitely more qualified firms out there. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (14:09)
That's awesome. That's, you gotta fake it till you make it. That's perfect. Amazing. So

fast forwarding, you're doing design stuff and cranking out 10 products a month for a toy company in China or wherever. And how do you come up with the idea for Elevated Craft or your first product line, Elevated Craft?

Adam Craft (14:24)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, earlier in starting the design engineering consultancy, I looked at that as a kind of a funnel. I thought that, man, it's really hard to sell ours as a career. And it had to scale up with labor if we wanted to get bigger and make more money. And I didn't feel like I was that great at hiring and that kind of thing. And so early on, I thought, OK, somebody is going to walk in the door and want to bring me on as an equity partner.

or there'll be an inventor that is doing something cool and we'll partner up or I'll make my own brand. And so three, four, five years goes by, we get a couple of those offers where the inventors are like, I wanna be partners with you. it was like, don't wanna get married to somebody like that. You realize early on they're like, I can't pay you anything, but if you're my business partner, I'll give you half of everything.

Adam Callinan (15:22)
Yeah, exactly where my brain goes. It's like, you just had a wedding proposal to a stranger. That sounds scary.

Adam Craft (15:32)
that kind of thing. So we had the crazy pitches, we entertained a couple of them whenever somebody would be like a more qualified, like we had some, I think it was like an IBM electrical engineering VP or somebody like that, that comes in and they're, they're doing stuff, but none of it really materialized in a way that felt, you know, like it was going to be worth putting the next 10 years behind. And so then I really just started focusing on, you know, what would it mean to make my own brand? And ⁓ since I could kind of

design anything I wanted, I actually started with the brand name with the brand Elevated Craft. And whenever I came up with that, I saw that it was available for trademark. was like, okay, I'll start designing some prototypes and things underneath the umbrella of Elevated Craft to just try to think through, you know, what things could could hit. And so I did a did a bunch of research and designs and like ⁓ cold brew coffee. I was looking in the kitchen where you know, I'm thinking like craft craft beer. ⁓ Maybe I could make

kegs or you know, whatever that those kind of things. And then eventually ⁓ landed on the cocktail shaker is something I thought I could really get under the hood of and, and knock out of the park. And so that's, that's kind of where the design part of it started. So the brand brand started first, worked through some designs for maybe six, eight months to a year before landing on the flagship product, which was a cocktail shaker.

Adam Callinan (16:57)
How did you launch that product? You did crowdfunding, right?

Adam Craft (17:01)
Yeah,

I did. ⁓

Well, I think to kind of take a step back from the launch itself, it was kind of a time and a place in my life. we had bought a house. My wife and I were talking about having kids. She gets pregnant as this design is coming along. And I'm thinking, literally freaked out. Like, I'm just not making enough money to pay for diapers and stuff. I was, but I was also just super scared.

And so Kickstarter was an option. And ⁓ after going through the prototyping process and building out the models and everything, then it became kind of the only option, right? It was like, I can't risk too much of this, you know? And I think I'd put like 30 grand of my own money into prototyping and all this sort of stuff. And so whenever it came to launch, was like, it had to work. And so yeah, it launched on Kickstarter. ⁓ I did that as a

solopreneur at that time. I was, it was just me, the baby. I, we ended up having twins by the way, a boy girl twins. And so they were born in 2019. And so I launched her over there about six months old, I think. So that entire time that my wife was pregnant, I was trying to figure out Kickstarter, being a student of it, listening to all the podcasts, reading all the books and everything really wrapped my head around marketing on it and like what, made a successful Kickstarter. And then, uh,

Adam Callinan (18:13)
Easy.

Adam Craft (18:34)
and then had to build out the campaign and all that stuff for like the first six months of their life. So I remember holding them in like a rocking chair, going through the script of the video and trying to figure out the lines that would pitch the product. Like what is the pitch? You know, it's like I designed something. I'm like, all right, how do I sell this thing? And that was like, that was where it started. Yeah. Little babies at home and a dream to launch the product and Kickstarter as the avenue for sure.

Adam Callinan (18:58)
And were

you still working in design at the time you were doing this?

Adam Craft (19:01)
I

was, yeah. I was still doing design engineering projects, but it was, it was fairly automated. had that, we had that toy company that was paying us that kind of like paid the bills. That was where we were doing the, you know, we're on contract to do a hundred products a year. So I able to do the concept work on those. And, uh, and I was just, you know, working late nights, weekends was, you know, I did, it was everything I, everything I could do, you know, to get it going. But yeah, yeah, still in that.

Adam Callinan (19:26)
Yeah.

So if you launched, was there anything that you did before or during the Kickstarter to try to prove concepts out or was the Kickstarter, really the Kickstarter like the proof of concept?

Adam Craft (19:44)
Yeah, I don't know. I had a lot of. Conviction going into it. I think it was. Well, let's just say this. I think I I built out a bunch of models and figured out where where I needed my row has to be and all that kind of stuff and I'm just I called it like brute force math so I'm not like an expert on Excel or anything, but I'm just going through and hammering out everything. I'm like, well, if it. If we're getting this kind of return on ad spend, here's my credit card limits and I had.

and so I'll have like great credit. And so I'm looking at these credit cards, I have like 90K available balance, 65K, 90, I'm like, okay, personally, I could scale this on credit cards, Kickstarter pays off in 14 days, so I can pay it back before it ever hits interest. So I had it all kind of worked out in my head and ⁓ I hadn't placed the first PO yet. So it was kind of like, all right, am I ordering 5,000 of these and just sending them straight to Amazon or am I?

gonna have a successful Kickstarter. I was going to launch the product and I knew enough about Amazon that literally my backup plan, like if everything failed, I'm like, well, I know I can sell these on Amazon for more than what I bought them from China. This is 2018. So it didn't feel that risky. I actually thought it was like there's no way this won't be and levels of success too, right? So I thought, if I do...

If I do 50K, that's enough to get like an investor excited later on down the road. If I do 100K, then that's enough to maybe get on a shark tank or whatever else. And I hadn't really thought through the next steps after that. was just kind of like, anything beyond that is good enough. Cause the work I put in, like, man, I got to at least do 100K on this. Like I've put in freaking, you know, so much effort on this thing. It's gotta work. And it ended up working out really well, but.

Adam Callinan (21:38)
How did you get eyeballs to that Kickstarter?

Adam Craft (23:04)
Yeah, it hasn't changed that much, but I mean, at the time we did, ⁓ I did a email lead gen campaign leading up to it about two weeks before. One of the things actually that I knew nothing about digital marketing. And so one of my kind of milestones along the way was, you know, make the, an awesome product to start, then make an awesome video for Kickstarter. Then it was, ⁓ crap, how do I market this?

And the leading agency at the time was called Jellup. And they're still around. They just focus on Kickstarter. And so I was like, well, if Jellup brings us on, because they were a commission only based marketing agency, like if they bring us on and they agree to do the project and that I saw that they worked on every other like really successful project, including the biggest ones around. And so whenever they agreed to take on the project, then I was like,

Okay, I should be good to go, you know. But they suggested doing a email Legion campaign leading up to it. I think I put in like 3500 bucks or something. The the at the time, they would say, I think if you could acquire an email for less than $2, you're doing okay. If you could acquire it for $1, you're probably doing really good. And anything less than that, you might have like a hit. And I think

know, potentially a lot of trust has been lost on Kickstarter at this point. don't really know. But at the time, the email lead gen did awesome. We were getting leads at like 70 cents an email. that 3500 bucks generated, you know, 5000 emails or whatever it was. that became the initial, you know, day one, two, three, because Kickstarter is all about having the first like three days of the campaign have to be rocket ships, or it just falls flat. It's really hard to recover after that. So that

That playbook worked and you know, still today it's if we will. We do plan on doing another kickstarter this summer and the plan will be to kind of drip it out to our email list and get them to get some excitement build up a few weeks before and just like any other product launch. But ⁓ yeah, that was how we got the eyeballs and paid ads at the time. ⁓ Kickstarter didn't do didn't have any ability to have ⁓ Facebook Pixel or anything on there. So tracking attribution was all through UTM links.

Adam Callinan (25:30)
Yeah.

Adam Craft (25:31)
And so ⁓ we just ran ads, Jellup ran the ads and the Google ads, and I just kept agreeing to let the budget ride. And also my ROAS boundary was they couldn't go below 4X ROAS. Imagine that like these days, right? It's like you can't, it's impossible to get. And I was like, you guys can spend as much as you want, but don't go below 4X ROAS. they were able to do it. So the campaign was extremely profitable too. And I didn't even know.

Adam Callinan (25:51)
Yeah.

Adam Craft (26:00)
Like my my actual goal is just don't lose money on this campaign. Like I charged way accidentally like way overcharged on shipping and all that stuff. But we can talk about that more. But yeah, yeah, it was good time to be launching a Kickstarter, I think.

Adam Callinan (26:10)
Yeah.

So what what did the campaign that first campaign do revenue on?

Adam Craft (26:19)
So

let me think about that. Just under 500K on Kickstarter. And then at the time, a common thing was to roll it right over to Indiegogo in demand. then it went on to do another $2 million in Indiegogo. So yeah.

Adam Callinan (26:30)
really?

So you crushed

your $50,000 worst case scenario. That's incredible.

Adam Craft (26:39)
Yeah, right.

Nearly 500k from Kickstarter and that was kind of the core audience. And then the way it worked back then was that on Indiegogo In Demand, it would say, know, however many people, 5,000 people back to this on another platform and it generated $479,000. So that gave it kind of like validity. So it was kind of a post, it was a post-launch strategy.

And, you know, this wacky thing was happening at the same time called COVID that hit right in the middle of my Kickstarter. Yeah. So that, that was fun. And that kind of, know, I'm sitting on this Kickstarter money at the point that I'm thinking like I need to place POs and stuff. So my campaign ran from October to November of 2019. And then

Adam Callinan (27:17)
Yeah.

Adam Craft (27:35)
I'm getting into that part of like, need to ramp the factories up. You past Chinese New Year and all of sudden March, you know, 2020, it's like factories are shutting down and I'm sitting on this Kickstarter money. I'm like, I can't.

Adam Callinan (27:41)
Yeah.

And they literally just

opened up, mean, Chinese New Year is in February, right around February. They just opened another show.

Adam Craft (27:52)
Right, yeah, exactly. But then you

could, yeah, started way in advance. I started hearing things that something was going down, right? And then all of a sudden, I am at this place where I need to start really ramping up production. I've got the money, I pulled into, I got in with a new manufacturer. the people that initially were doing the prototype kind of,

Weren't able to pull it off correctly. And so was enough to do some videos with, but not enough to actually come to, you know, to do mass production with. just didn't, it wasn't working out. And so, so yeah, it was a crazy, it was at that point where I'm like, I have to launch this product and all the factories are shut down and I'm sitting on like, you know, $500,000 Kickstarter cash. And then the, the other one starts rolling in. It's just like, the money's kind of building up, which is IE like,

my responsibility to deliver on these goods is also building. So I wasn't like spending any of it. was staying home, doing nothing, but trying to build the company. And yeah, it was, it was a pretty scary time. Like there's no doubt about that, but I had complete conviction that I was going to deliver the products. was kind of like how to time it in a way that I could responsibly put money into the factories that aren't going to go out of business. And so it was this crazy game of chess.

And I was just solopreneuring it, trying to work through these things. the big thing that worked out was that a lot of Kickstarter campaigns go sideways. Like if you ever read the comments on, you there'll be a successful Kickstarter campaign and you'll read the comments like, this is a scam. They didn't deliver on time. Yeah, exactly. I want my money back, all that sort of stuff. And so...

Adam Callinan (29:37)
Yeah, eight months later, they haven't delivered their product. Yeah.

Adam Craft (29:44)
I was just so determined to not let the campaign go sideways that I did everything I could do to, you know, film videos of myself just like this. And I'll be talking about the product and holding it up and being like, here's the latest prototype to, you know, really doing some like, uh, I dunno, like getting my MBA and PR type type thing where I'm thinking about like, okay, I've got this information, but I can't let it out.

Adam Callinan (30:05)
you

Adam Craft (30:10)
this week because I already gave this other message and that needs to kind of like percolate into the audience. So next week I'll tell them about this tooling delay that we have or that the factories are closed down or whatever, right? So it was such a gnarly time, but that's what allowed those sales to continue to build because there was trust there. So as things were shut down, people saw that the...

that I was on there a lot and communicating well with them. And so the sales started, kept coming in, the pre-sales kept coming in. And then eventually I was able to deliver the first like 10,000 units or something like that or 5,000 units. So was enough that then I had like the haves and the have nots. So there's like enough people out there to write things about it and all the people that were still waiting. And I'm like, sorry, the factory's still shut down. I don't know what to tell you, but you your stuff is coming. But yeah, so that's.

Adam Callinan (31:04)
Yeah, it's amazing how communication

solves most problems. Like everywhere, personally, professionally, just sort of across the board.

Adam Craft (31:08)
For sure. Yeah.

Yeah, being able to have that. I mean, the the biggest benefit, I think, to somebody launching a Kickstarter even today is having that dialogue with the actual people that are putting the money behind it. And to do it in such a it's pretty high stakes because it's all public. I mean, the comments section, they'll and these super backers know that they're not going to private DM you their concern. They're going to make sure they put it on the public forum.

Adam Callinan (31:38)
Yeah.

Adam Craft (31:39)
that any

consumer can click on and you have to go like, okay, how do I answer this like authentically? But also they may be asking for something that's just not possible, know, where it's like, I need you to cover the duties to send this to Sweden because shipping so high. So you have to do this, have to, know, like basically threatening you publicly and you have to be like, I don't, you know, or telling you that you have to change the design because of X, Y, Z and why the design is bad. And you're like,

Adam Callinan (32:02)
Yeah.

Adam Craft (32:08)
I already got the molds being built. So it's ⁓ definitely a public arena for it. But if you do it well, then you get those fans for life. And I think it goes to that sort of like 1,000 true fans that Kevin Kelly wrote about that article ⁓ that really stands true is like, get 1,000 people that are really backing you. ⁓ You can build a company around it. So that's what we did.

Adam Callinan (32:33)
There's also

a tremendous amount of value to be driven by crisis and how you deal with crisis. I we dealt with that in Bottle Keeper countless times where something got destroyed or lost or blew up or a ship sunk in the middle of the ocean with a bunch of product that like, whatever, everything that could happen, what happened and how you deal with that. I mean, it's how you get those people from angry to your like best customers ever.

Adam Craft (32:50)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I have a hilarious kind of thing that popped up. I think it's funny. I don't know if anybody else will, but so on Kickstarter, there was some things that came out with the original cocktail shaker, which I don't have in front of me. have our latest one. ⁓ But on the inside, one of the core things that made it kind of Kickstarter bowl was I call this a basically coined the term hybrid cocktail shaker because it has gaskets. So it doesn't leak. It also has threads. So it threads on and it's got a built in measuring top.

And that was kind of the aha moment that I felt made it Kickstarterable. It's also vacuum insulated, so it doesn't freeze your hand. So, you know, the part of the Kickstarter side was that nobody had put a giant measuring top in the top of a cocktail shaker. They just put like a little one ounce one in the lid and you had to pour it 500 times for making a batch of margaritas. And so that was the kind of invention that made me...

know that I thought I would do well on Kickstarter because it had that like, but wait, there's more aspect to it, right? So, but on Kickstarter, I, because I didn't have any sway with the factories, the original one, had to make a lot of concessions in the design for where the factors like, Nope, we can't do that. Nope, we can't do that. Sorry, we can't do that. And one of those was, yeah, the original factory. So the original design on the inside of the measuring top has this kind of stair step.

Adam Callinan (34:13)
I think.

Adam Craft (34:21)
design. it's like you get it up to step number one, that's one ounce, step number twos, two ounce and so on. And I didn't have any other like embossed lettering on there. So I didn't it didn't say one, two, three or four, because I thought of it as like, kind of like directionally correct, not absolutely correct on measurements. Like, you just need a proportion. I want two ounces of tequila, four ounces of margarita mix or whatever. And on Kickstarter, they were like the backers like, you really need to put this on. And by the way, you know, put 123456

By the way, ⁓ it needs to be in milliliters also. And so now I'm like dialing the design to make it work for both milliliters and ounces. ⁓ But in that process, they also kind of called out that having the halfway mark. So some people were like, you know, it's fine that it does the whole marks, but I have to estimate where the halfway mark is. And so in the font, let's say that it says two ounces and it's two OZ. I put a line above the OZ that indicates the halfway

Adam Callinan (34:57)
Yeah.

Adam Craft (35:18)
mark in the the stair step. And ⁓ it's not a it's not a font you could like just look up where it like auto puts us on. It was just a kind of part of the design. The part that goes full circle is hex glad launched a shaker with ⁓ this is like a couple of months ago. They launched with Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. They completely copied the exact font like the exact so it says two ounce with the line over it. And I'm like, that was that was literally the bad design.

Adam Callinan (35:41)
You

Adam Craft (35:47)
Like I literally had to like reverse this into the design to try to like go, shit, I have to do half tick marks and come, you know, six years later, I'm like kind of like knocked off by hex cloud on this part of it. So it's like they made it. They made the inferior version of our shaker because, know, the new one is I had the sway with the factory and we've sold enough units and stuff that I could make whatever I wanted. So I made exactly the shaker that I wanted. The original one was, you know, it.

Adam Callinan (35:54)
Yeah.

That's awesome.

Adam Craft (36:16)
created the category of hybrid cocktail shakers and it's very good. It's does tons of reviews and all that sort of stuff. yeah, it was between Kickstarter backers and then seeing it come full circle. And I'm like, why would they do? They copied that one little feature of it that that's like, you know, it should have never been there. There's so many better ways of doing it than the way I originally did it. hey, yeah.

Adam Callinan (36:42)
Flattery, know, like the classic, what's the saying? Invitation is the cheapest form of flattery or something.

Adam Craft (36:43)
Yeah, exactly.

I think

when I when I first when we first crossed paths at the outdoor retail show, I think that's something you said where you were dealing with a lot of knockoffs even at the show. You were like, like, yeah, walking around.

Adam Callinan (36:57)
man. That would have been in 2000.

We got our first patent in 2000.

November 29th, 2016, and then we spent the next two years and an incredible amount of money defending them and creating all the structures so that we could defend them on Amazon. We had to sue a bunch of small companies to get consent judgments, not to ruin their lives, just to get them to stop and sign a thing that's agreed they violated our patents. We could get consent judgments and then use as a registration number in Amazon. And that took forever. And then it just like, it's just the whackable game from there. And there's, there's a lot of systems and things that we could build to automate it, but it was.

Adam Craft (37:27)
Just crazy. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (37:34)
It's like every time you see a fake version of your product on a shelf somewhere on a website or at a trade show, it's like a gut punch.

Adam Craft (37:42)
Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, we we deal with it all the time to have filed tons and tons of patents. And thankfully, the Amazon brand registry now exists and you can kind of do a little bit of defense work on their tick tock has their IP back end also. ⁓

Adam Callinan (37:54)
Yeah, that's changed a Yeah, and the

Amazon side, had brand registry. They've had that for a while, but it has changed a lot. We used to have brand registry. You can now fight about it without having to look at your own. Yeah.

Adam Craft (38:03)
Yeah, well, what do they call it?

Right, the apex, you can make an

apex claim that somebody violated on your side, so.

Adam Callinan (38:13)
You have to put up money, like you have to put up five grand or something. And if they don't put up five grand to fight about it, then you just win by default, which is way better than what it used to be. They used to just say pound sand, cool patent, go get a court to validate the patent and we will enforce on it. So we had to spend a year and half a million dollars going to get those fricking numbers. And it worked really well once then, because then it's, once we had the numbers, because then it wasn't Amazon making the deterrent.

Adam Craft (38:15)
Yeah.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Callinan (38:40)
whether or not the patent was valid. The courts, like a US court system had said the patent is valid. It was a brutal, brutal process.

Adam Craft (38:45)
Yeah. Did you feel

like ultimately was there an ROI on the, the cost and effort? Yeah.

Adam Callinan (38:51)
yeah, it's why we sold the company for what we sold it for and to who we sold it

to. They were the private equity group that acquired Bottlekeeper in 2021, it's called Windpoint Partners. They, in the first four or five hours of conversations we had with them about, they had just acquired Arctic Outdoors, like RTIC Outdoors, six months before us. They did not ask one time in those four or five hours of conversations what our revenue was, if we were profitable, like they did not care.

at all. All they wanted was our 42 patents and our brand was premium like we had insane or gross margins were like 85 % and Artix were not. That was an entirely different business model. So those are the only two things that they cared about. But the patent portfolio is what drove that transaction.

Adam Craft (39:33)
Yeah, that makes you feel better. We file a lot, we get a lot, we get a lot issued and then all of sudden you have to continue paying more and more. I have a lot of Chinese patents too and every year it's like another 600 bucks or whatever it costs to like do all these continuations. I'm like, this was issued, I thought I owned the, I thought I owned the IP now, what the heck? So it becomes the, yeah, the gift that keeps costing. But it was interesting like with the, on the IP front.

Adam Callinan (39:48)
I'm

Thank you.

Adam Craft (40:00)
I kind of on the IP front. back to when I started Elevated Craft, I was reading tons and tons of business books. And I'm sure we all go through this in our lives at different times. And one of those was I think it's called Play Bigger. And some consultant guys wrote it. I think it's one of those they seem like cool, cool guys. I think it's one of those like, I'm going to write this book so that I can get paid by, you know, McKinsey to come in and do speeches or whatever it is. But but the whole concept was

you becoming a category king. And it's like you can you can do a few different things. You can be first to market or you can, you know, compete on price or you can create your own category. And that's where I kind of saw the, you know, the tea leaves on the on the shaker where I'm like, like, man, this is a commodity. There's no way I can compete against $12 shakers. The most expensive shaker on on Amazon was 50 or not even Amazon. The most expensive shaker I could find was like 50 bucks. I'm like, well, I got to invent enough things into this.

to be able to call it something different. And so that's where the hybrid cocktail shaker came into play, which is in now, you it's kind of played out exactly how I hoped it would, where it's become a category. Now there's, you know, competition in there, which is, is fine. And we have patents that we can defend and that, that sort of thing. But ultimately, I wanted the consumers to know about this new type, you know, that there was a new way to do the cocktail shaker. If, it was just going to be compared with a, any other cocktail shaker.

there's no way we could charge 70 bucks for it. And that was initially what we did. was like, man, there's at least most expensive shakers 50 bucks. Like I've been working my butt off on this for like 18 months. Like there's at least $20 worth of value in this additional value in this. ⁓

Adam Callinan (41:44)
There's there's

really, really good data points inside of that thesis that we executed at bottle keeper as well that I end up spending a lot of time with pentane clients talking about, which is around being able to add margin dollars, which is effectively where your profit comes from into the product by adding value to it being able to increase the prices as a result. Like at bottle keeper, our very first product was $20 and I felt like that was expensive and

Adam Craft (42:06)
Right.

Adam Callinan (42:11)
To me, was expensive. I mean, it cost four bucks to make or whatever it was, and we sold it for $20. We added things to that product over two years, like a tether to the cap, and we added powder coating, and we built a bottle opener into the lid, and a couple things that probably cost less than a dollar in total. And we tested the price up in that product at $40, and successfully, it worked amazing. So your point on adding all those things that the value per...

Adam Craft (42:24)
Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah.

Nice. Yeah, yeah.

Adam Callinan (42:39)
the customer perceives as valuable is incredible. Because today, like in the world of e-commerce, it's wildly different than it was 10 years ago. And what it costs to acquire a customer is wildly different than it was five years ago, seven years ago. So being able to add the value to the product to to be able to drive the price up because you've added perceived value is like mission critical. I think it's overlooked a lot.

Adam Craft (42:42)
Mm-hmm.

Sure. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

Right. And we, I think the design term would be value engineering. So we'll go through things and you you find these little areas where, where you can add a lot of value without it costing a ton of money. And it's most, it's usually tied to user experience in my, in my experience. Yeah. The, the better you can deliver on that than, you know, and sometimes it doesn't cost that much. It could be packaging. It could be.

Adam Callinan (43:23)
Totally.

Adam Craft (43:32)
just better quality materials or weight, know, perceived value is another thing that that we talk about a lot. It's like, if it doesn't feel like it's quality, then you lose even if it is, you know, you don't have to have to justify it. You can just have people feel the product and they know it's good.

Adam Callinan (43:51)
Yeah, there is definitely a touch and feel component to that. So in shifting gears a little bit, looking back at your startup story with elevated craft, doing it while with newborn twins, I I have kids, I don't have twins, that adds like a whole other element of complexity to my brain. And then doing it into COVID and in the post-COVID world, which is different.

It's just different from a consumer standpoint. The e-commerce world is different. It's not better or worse necessarily. It's just different. How have you survived that? Like, are there things that you have implemented into your life in order to kind of withstand these insane ups and downs that we all deal with?

Adam Craft (44:39)
⁓ yeah. I I think like, I stay really grounded about what I, what it's all about, you know, what it's for. And I'm really focused on being a good dad. And so I, I hardly ever open my laptop at home. It's just not, it doesn't mean I don't check some slack things on my phone or something, but I just find that, you there's a time for me to work and there's time for me to be a dad. And I keep those, you know,

very separate and it's come naturally because there was a time where, when we were first starting, I simply could not do anything else. You know what I mean? Like I couldn't, at the point that I'm home, there's two kids, there's two parents, one of us has one, one has the other. If I'm taking care of one, it's so that my wife could get two hours of sleep and then we're kind of going back and forth. So it wasn't like, I was putting in the mental reps on thinking through things.

But ultimately it's about kind of that balance there. And I think being a parent sort of forces that balance. It's a force function to it. Because before being a parent, I I was a complete workaholic. didn't, you I would, if I was into a project, I didn't have friends for six months. You know, it didn't matter. Like I would just do that. Like I would just do the work thing. ⁓ So I think that's been the biggest balance in just, you know, getting outdoors.

stressed out about something. It's like the ultimate reset is just get in the woods and brain turns off and you get to be out there enjoying nature. But I think that's the biggest thing. mean, there's all kinds of tools and things we use in business that's made things easier on how we think about investing in stuff and product development and sort of how that's changed over time. But the personal life is...

Turn it off. Be with the kids.

Adam Callinan (46:37)
Yeah, that's great. And clearly defined priorities can be really helpful. So helpful in that and trying to separate those things. Amazing. Where do you want people to find you, find elevated graft, your updates on what you're selling?

Adam Craft (46:54)
Just out,

what's that? updates, just elevatedcraft.com. Pretty straightforward on there. And yeah, we have a new, this is our second Kickstarter that came out. I'm not sure if this show up, but this is called a hybrid cocktail glass, the glass insert, but we're launching a new colorway tomorrow. This is the brushed Aurora finish. So we're starting to get into a little bit of colorways, but.

this summer planning on doing another Kickstarter. we can get all the, get everything lined out with the factories and whatnot. And so I would keep an eye on that. It's for launching four new major skews this year, but inside of there, there's sub skews. it's actually our product line is going to more than double this year. So yeah, so that's, that's super exciting. Last year was hard with tariffs and things to do much of anything productive. And so this year it's kind of like,

stabilized enough that we're launching things, yeah, ElevatedCraft.com is the place.

Adam Callinan (47:58)
Awesome, I look forward to seeing that stuff. love watching the product cycles on products like this come out, it's so cool. We'll make sure the links and everything are in the show notes so you can find them there. Awesome, well thanks to Tom for coming, Adam, I really appreciate the time. Super fun.

Adam Craft (48:15)
Yeah, thanks for

having me. All right, cheers.

Adam Callinan (48:19)
Awesome.