In many ways, Aaron Panone, BEET ’08, is his own best customer. His company, Cuppow, and its first product of the same name—a drinking lid adaptor—grew out of a simple, personal need: to find a better way to drink out of mason jars.
“We always drank out of jars,” Panone says of he and his business partner, Joshua Resnikoff. “It wasn’t like ‘Hey, this is an opportunity for us to make some money,’ it was more like ‘Hey, this would be great if this existed for us.’”
Resnikoff and his wife approached Panone with the basic idea for the drinking lid in 2011. Initially, Panone admits, he thought it was a silly concept. After graduating from Wentworth he’d been doing contract work full time, designing products like medical devices for hospitals.
He realized, however, that he couldn’t really look at the two types of design projects in the same way.
“When you go from designing tools for a shoulder surgery to something like this, you can’t really compare the two,” he says.
Panone immediately had some ideas about how the drinking lid adaptor could work, and after going back and forth on a few concepts, he and Resnikoff settled on injection-molded plastics as the material to work with, and took measures to make sure the plastic was food-safe, heat-safe and leak-proof. They recruited other small businesses that, like Cuppow, are based out of Fringe, a multidisciplinary workspace in Somerville, Mass., to help with graphic design, web design, packaging, printing, and photography.
As they obtained patents and trademarks, they also established a business philosophy—one that included a heavy emphasis on sustainability and on giving. Panone says that, since neither he nor Resnikoff were working at Cuppow full-time, they were able to make some choices that perhaps other business owners feel they can’t.
“We both had jobs, so we were like, ‘Let’s just do things the way we want to do them. We’re going to give to charity and everything’s going to be made in the USA.’ We didn’t want to spare anything on any aspect of the company,’” Panone says. “Which probably wouldn’t have been very sustainable if we were trying to live off of it, but since we weren’t, it was fine.”
With no venture capital behind them— Panone and Resnikoff had each put in about $1,000—they released their first run of 500 lid adaptors on January 10, 2012. That initial batch sold out in 72 hours.
Now in its third year, Cuppow has an additional offering called BNTO (ben-toh), an insert that divides canning jars into compartments for easier food transport. The products are available in about 1,300 retail stores and online, and Panone says the brand has seen about 30 percent growth each year. They’ve sold a couple hundred thousand units, and last year, they donated $20,000 to charity.
Panone and Resnikoff are now also leveraging their supply-chain influence and network to essentially become the U.S. distributor for other small companies.
Panone says he uses Cuppow every day as he works on a combination of Cuppow-related business, contract work and personal design projects, including bicycle components and eyewear. He credits his Wentworth education with giving him the tools and hands-on experience to carve out his own path in the industry.
“I’ve been able to continue to do things my own way,” he says. “It’s not this super glamorous thing. But I’m making ends meet, and I don’t have to do the things people told me I had to do to get paid.”
Visit www.cuppow.com tolearn more.
–Deblina Chakraborty
