Making a product is kind of hard - even a simple one!

So The Cowbelt is a really simple product overall, I mean, it's just a piece of plastic and a strap, so it must be super easy, right? Well, not exactly... As it turns out, making a thing takes a good bit of trial, error, doing, and redoing. 

Backing up a step to the previous story about the idea for The Cowbelt, we came up with a few basic criteria that our product must meet:

1. The cowbell must be confidently secured
2. The cowbell must not 'clank' when walking
3. The product must be dead-simple to use
4. The product needs to be really simple to manufacture and assemble

With those basic ideas in mind, we had to try out a few different things that might work, like this:

Or this thing with an elastic band:

Ultimately what we decided on was a plastic clip and non-stretchy strap that would attach to a person's belt, but even that had some refinement to go through. Namely, the initial design required extra pieces to securely hold the strap in place: 

We eventually had the realization that we could incorporate that tensioning piece into the belt clip, which meant we could make our product using only 2 parts!

I hope you enjoyed a brief history of the trial and error in designing our product.