Kapsul

Kapsul was a gem of a start-up that generated $2.3m in crowd-funding and brought light to a stagnant industry. This rise to fame and fall from grace is a historic telling of a company with too many chefs in the kitchen taking over 4 years to provide minimal viable products to backers with little to no communication.

Kapsul sought to fight the stagnation of the window AC unit industry by innovating the product for efficiency, connectivity, and style. Invented by Kurt Swanson and Don Pancoe reaching headlines throughout Philadelphia for it's successful crowdfunding and fantastic prototype. Kapsul raised $2.3 million in crowdfunding and was slated to be one of the most successful start-up companies in history.

It took Kapsul 5 years to ship a product to customers. In that 5 years communication between the company and it's backers was so limited that people thought it just would never come. The expectation that the company got the money and ran had sound reasoning considering the monthly updates became repetitive and eventually ceased altogether.

Once the product did ship it had connectivity issues, housing brackets failed, there were manufacturing defects, and motherboards failed. Public outcry soared and customer service became a war zone of misplaced hate and overzealous promises.

If you have at all followed this start-up in the past you'll know all of this already, but let me introduce a perspective of the company from the inside.

Starting in the timeline from funding secured we can follow along in the grueling process that was inventing an industry-disrupting product during a trade war and the pandemic.

Once the prototyping was complete in early 2018 and manufacturers in China were being contacted and provided tooling for manufacturing in late 2018 public outcry for hope of an answer was heard. 2019 was the year that Kapsul would ship its first batch of product.

Let's consider the typical fulfillment process for a product to go from production to porch. You start with a manufacturer completing a batch of units and shipping them overseas from China to the United States typically through a port. Once through customs the product reaches the United States where it is inspected again and is distributed throughout the country to fulfillment centers. Those fulfillment centers are the last leg of the process and typically the most volatile step.

2020 began a series of events that completely halted this company in every aspect of this process.

For the sake of following the timeline I will write this out of sync with a typical product fulfillment lifecycle.

The first obstacle came in 2019 with the tariffs Donald Trump placed on imports from China which included our product. This increased product cost by almost 100%. In 2020 Covid-19 hit halting most shipments from China which included a shipment of 1,000 units which waited in a port for almost half a year. After product landed in the hands of the consumer the last nail in the coffin hammered in. An immeasurable amount of product was affected by a manufacturing defect in the fan brackets that mounted fans in the unit. This resulted in an awful screeching sound that was almost impossible to get rid of without dropping the unit. Among other defects which ranged from connectivity issues to loud compressors the motherboards began to fail.

It's easy to blame this outcome on the manufacturers, pandemic, and government but at the end of the day it happened. While it may not have been avoidable it could have been graceful.

We've seen first hand what it looks like when a company admits problems and mistakes. In 2017 when Pepsi pulled their ad with Kendall Jenner and apologized for the undermining of the Black Lives Matter movement the public outcry ceased. CD Projekt Red delayed the release of this hit game Cyberpunk 2077 by 6 months and communicated a reason with every delay.

Looking back on Kapsul didn't need to be a story of mismanagement, miscommunication, and a failure to fulfill expectations. It should have been a story of an attempt that was slated to fail, but tried anyways. The publics understanding of a topic will forever impact an industry, and while Kapsul is no longer in the window AC industry, it will showcase a terrifying faux reality to any entrepreneurs looking to satisfy the mission statement of Kapsul in the future.

Whether you're a start-up "suffering from success" or an established company holding on to a shrinking budget with a death grip, you can depend on the humanization of corporations in the eyes of the public. If not to utilize this human instinct of pity to allow someone in the future to fill this magnificent footprint you created.

Kapsul was a phoenix that never rose from its ashes having succumb to it's injuries inflicted by a pandemic, manufacturers, and governments. Suffering in silence at the disapproval of the public. Humanizing a company to convey difficulty when the world is struggling connects your story telling with them. Knowing that they are not alone in this hardship.