The early days and the crowd-funding period of wor.my
The beginning of the wor.my story is one that is usually told by those who started thinking next to their desk. This very desk was located in a century-old country house in Pomáz, a small town just outside Budapest, Hungary. First there was a sketch only, then Szabolcs gave it a long and thorough thought how a prototype could be produced. That would still be one piece only but a piece that worked. At the beginning, Szabolcs stuck the spring-poles that he had bent in a semi-automated factory in the neighborhood into old grips. There were an endless number of changes during the one year he kept going back there.
Before and after
The aluminum reel seat came about the following way: based Szabolcs’s sketch an old man manufactured it on a metal-milling machine in Budapest. The man typically made solids of revolution on a metal lathe. At this point, all Szabolcs needed was a wooden handle that was produced by a wood-carver and subsequently refined by him.
Szabolcs then started using this first version of the rod for a while, and then decided to take the reel seat to a CNC workshop where the first hard-anodized, CNC-machined reel seat took a long time to be manufactured. With this step the first such prototype was born that technically and visually truly resembled to the wor.my rod as we know it today.
The evolution of the trigger
When he had the prototype ready, Szabolcs decided to submit an entry for a prestigious design award in his home country. However, days before he did so, he had filed an application at the patent office at the end of April 2015. Szabolcs was awarded the Hungarian Design Award in early June.
Szabolcs prepared the first video footage for Kickstarter with his then 10-year-old daughter. He practically produced everything on his own: all photos, videos and written content. A one-man show in every sense. He also handled the zillion questions during the 40 days of the campaign all alone. At the end of 2015, with a successful Kickstarter campaign behind him, he went on to Indiegogo in Demand from where further pre-orders arrived. In March 2017 wor.my also became available on Indiegogo Marketplace.
And who knows? We may come out with something in the near future that will be successful on the crowd-funding scene…