Creating Rim-O

Do you know how sometimes you are sitting around with friends, talking, and you come up with a great idea? How often do we follow through with our great ideas? Aren't you frustrated when you see someone else has thought of it, too, and followed through? I had an idea a couple years ago. I'm making this one happen, partly in honor of all the great ideas left behind.

I was obsessed with Instant Pot electric pressure cooking. One night while having a cocktail with my husband after dinner we were discussing how people come up with successful inventions. I said it was problem solving. Then as an example I blurted out the problem of the food spilling in the drain channel and element of the Instant Pot. I hadn't even given it a thought. It was words before it was an idea. The solution seemed simple.

For a long time I lived in fear that I would find my idea online, executed by someone else. Time, money, and really just not knowing what the next step should be held me back for three years. The Makers Space at my local library gave me the first big breakthrough. I went there hoping for a recommendation of someone to hire and ended up learning to make the model myself. With patient encouragement from Ira, who runs the Makers Space, I was able to design and create a working model of Rim-O for $5 without any previous 3D modeling experience. I used that model, and two others I made improvements on, at home on my Instant Pot for the last couple years while I figured out the next steps. 

While I've done most of the work of making Rim-O on my own, the motivation to do so came from so much more; My husband's encouragement and hustle in his own business, my grandfather's example of hard work and innovation, my creative family members, my desire to create something useful, the artists I see hustling every day to make their dreams support them, my realization that I'd prefer my chocolate business to remain small, my daughter's belief in me and offer to be my first customer and employee.

I remember as a kid designing big flow-y pants with the crotch hanging below the knees and tapered at the ankle. I drew many renditions of them. Soon after that MC Hammer was wearing them. What the heck? I came up with those! Collective consciousness or coincidence? It was a lesson to go with the great ideas. I mean, I was a kid in the eighties. It's not like I could have actually started the MC Hammer pants trend on my own. They are basically Harem pants, anyway, which had already been around for a long time. But someone made them popular again. When I come up with another idea, why shouldn't it be me sharing it with the world?