Put Your Best Foot Forward

Steve Melito: Hey everybody, Welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now, the podcast that’s powered by FuzeHub. I’m your host, Steve Melito. Today we’re talking to Jailin Ke, the co-founder and CEO of Soulo, a Brooklyn-based company that has developed an ergonomic toenail trimmer that is designed for aging adults and people with disabilities. In 2023, Soulo was awarded a $50,000 Commercialization Competition award at the New York State Innovation Summit, and that’s just some of what we’ll talk about today. Jailin, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now.

Jailin Ke: Hi Steve, it’s great to be here.

Steve Melito: Well, thanks so much, so let’s start by having you tell us about yourself. You’re a product designer by trade, and I’m wondering how you became interested in that field and where you received your education, experience and training.

Jailin Ke: Yeah, so I was actually first interested in architecture before going into product design. So it started in high school. I did this internship with architecture construction engineering program in New York City and I realized I really liked designing for people and thinking about what people need and how we can make an environment, a space or an experience better for people. And so I went to college at Cornell University, actually first intending to study architecture and interior design, but eventually in my junior year I transitioned into UX design. But the concepts are the same. Actually, it’s just thinking about how can I make a digital experience better for people. So, yeah it. It was really interesting. I majored in design and environmental analysis at Cornell, which is a lot of a breadth in terms of like. We learned all kinds of design. We learned interior design and architecture, we did some industrial design and physical product design, which is most relevant to how I founded my company and then I also learned UX and digital product design as well.

Steve Melito: Well, excellent. So let’s go from that to talking about entrepreneurship a bit and there’s a risk in starting your own business, and your skill set is in high demand with employers, so naturally I’m wondering why did you start your own company?

Jailin Ke: Yeah, I think we just really wanted to see this product come to life, and bringing it to reality, I think, required, actually, that we become an entity and have the funding and resources to be able to do that. We founded the company in 2020, actually like right as the pandemic hit, and it was also during a time when I was like, you know, I don’t know what’s the many of the projects that I was looking forward to like bringing forward and bring to reality just kind of got canceled. And so this was one thing that I felt like you know, I don’t usually especially in college you don’t usually get to see your product ideas or even the things that you design. They usually never leave your sketchbook or they don’t leave your class and I just felt driven to, you know, because I knew that there was a need for it and I knew that people were asking me for it, so I felt just very driven to actually bring it to life and be able to help people.

Steve Melito: It’s an important product and I’m wondering if you can tell us some more about it, maybe starting with why did you decide to invent an electric toenail trimmer instead of something else? There’s got to be a story here.

Jailin Ke: Yeah, I know it’s very, very niche and every time I explain it people are like, oh, people never think about it. But you know it’s a real need. So, for context, in my junior year of college I actually participated in the New York State Department of Aging competition where they had a open prompt for people to submit any physical product design that would help with a ADL so activities of daily living, which includes everything from like hygiene to like eating, to mobility, and so I actually started out intending to submit to that competition and I went to do a focus group with my grandma and some of the senior adults who lived in her building in Queens and, lo and behold, like one of the things that came out of that conversation was nail trimming, and I just never thought about that. You know, I mean there’s the more typical things that people think about, which is like I can’t move around or like I have trouble showering or I have trouble toileting, like I have trouble showering or I have trouble toileting. But the nail trimming thing really caught my attention because I would have never thought of that until someone brought it up. So I was like, at least in terms of like, actually positioning myself for this competition. I was like this is a really interesting angle to take, because I bet no one else is doing this. I bet no one else is thinking about this and doing this. So that’s actually the main reason why I did it, because I was like I’ve seen a lot of other products out there for all the other problem spaces, but really nothing nothing for this problem. Yeah, so just to give a little introduction about the trimmer it is a long-handled nail trimmer and basically it comes in two parts. So the first part is the actual filing and grinding unit and this is actually its standalone piece, and then you can attach the extension arm through the back so that it becomes longer for you. You can use this actually without the arm independently, just on your fingernails as well. But I think the thing that really changed the game for us, when we were designing this product as well, was just this like divot that’s at the bottom, because it really lets you hug the top of your nail and the top of your toenail really well in a very stable position. And that was something that we had struggled with in terms of just the design, because it was really hard to give someone something very long on a long stick and be able to do something precise with it, because it was always very unstable. So now it’s quite stable, which is good.

Steve Melito: That’s quite an accomplishment, I would imagine, because you are serving a population that is oftentimes older. It may be difficult to hold something in that position if it wasn’t ergonomic. Speaking from experience not personally myself, but my wife’s dad for many years used to have to go to the doctor to have his nails trimmed. He was unable to do so himself. So there’s a need for this, and certainly it’s hard to get in to see the doctor enough, as it is sometimes.

Jailin Ke: Yes, 100%, and also because we were launching this or not launching. We were kind of like designing this. During the pandemic we got a lot of inquiries that told us hey, I really need this because I can’t go outside and no one can come in here so I can’t get help in any way and the nail salons are closed. The podiatry I don’t know like, especially during the pandemic, was hard. Now we’re hearing less of that, for sure, because the pandemic is kind of over, but there’s still a lot of people with like osteoarthritis, for example, who can’t bend at the hip or in their shoulder or, you know, in their knee, and it’s quite painful. A lot of people who are overweight perhaps would need this as well Just can’t quite reach their toes in a comfortable manner. People who have like a disc. There’s a medical term for this, but a herniated disc also might have a lot of pain bending over. So, yeah, we’ve really seen a wide range of ailments for why people like could be looking for a solution like this.

Steve Melito: Sure, and you mentioned this a little bit how there were some design challenges and on your website you wrote that the Soulo nail trimmer itself is probably the most difficult design challenge that I’ve grappled with in my career. Can you talk more about that and maybe how you overcame it?

Jailin Ke: Yes, I think it was the most difficult design challenge for a variety of reasons, one being that this problem is very difficult to tackle because there’s a wide, wide range of people and people’s bodies are all different, right. So there’s different leg lengths, like people could be different heights, your toenail thickness could be different, the shape of your toes could be different. So it was really difficult designing a solution that should work for everyone when everyone’s bodies is like a little bit different. So, you know, we had went down a rabbit hole initially in our exploration of this, just thinking like how precise can we be with this device? You know, can we design something custom for everyone? Like at one point we were thinking maybe the solution here is that they need to like imprint their foot on something and then send it to us and then we give them a custom nail device that will just work for them. So luckily, that’s not what we did and we found something that would work for everyone. But that was one key thing that was difficult. And then another thing that we thought a lot about was just safety, because it’s very hard to see what you’re trimming sometimes because it’s so far away from you and a lot of people have fear about clipping too far in or anything like that. So we just decided not to do a clipping mechanism at all, just because it could be you could clip too close or you could clip your skin. So we just didn’t want like a blade in the device for safety reasons. So it is technically a filer and it’s just sanding down your nail, which we decided was just a safer method and then the last point I thought that stability aspect of it was what we struggled with the most, because you’re holding something on a long pole and you expect it to go each nail, and that was really difficult and we did so many prototypes on this. We actually did like 10 different prototypes before we got to the version that we’re selling today on the website. And it’s really because that divot at the bottom of the trimmer really helps stabilize the product. And on top of all this, I have to make sure that it’s manufacturable and moldable, which is a whole other design challenge in itself too, because you know, sometimes you create things in 3D print and then you take it to a manufacturer and they’re like well, we can’t actually mold this because there’s overhangs or there’s other problems. So it’s also the fact that there’s a lot of constraints when it comes to bringing something from an idea to a prototype, to a reality. There’s just so many things to consider in between.

Steve Melito: Yeah, and you went through multiple iterations and had to deal with some tough issues. So, based on your experience designing this product, or maybe just going out on your own, starting your own company in general, what are some lessons you can share with other product designers and entrepreneurs? We talked to a lot of them here at FuzeHub.

Jailin Ke: We talked to a lot of them here at FuzeHub. Yeah, I’ll start with maybe some initial thoughts I have for product designers who are, you know, inventing their own products or devices or physical objects. So I think one always try a proof of concept before deep diving into really refined details. For context, we did prototyping for maybe three years and that’s a really long time to spend doing prototyping but I just knew it wasn’t the right design yet and so we had to keep going because I knew it wasn’t. It just didn’t make me as a consumer feel like, oh, this is helping me enough. So we went down some rabbit holes, this is helping me enough. So we went down some rabbit holes, which is why I’m some wasted time, because we went so deep into, like, refining something before realizing like this overall idea just does not work. So that’s my first tip is just, you know, do something extremely scrappy before you go into the details and then my second piece of advice we had a lot of conversations as, like the product team just thinking about hypotheticals. So what if this was one thing? You know, originally the product was actually approaching the nail from its direct face, versus now it’s coming from top down. And I had that idea because I was like, oh, there’s so much space. We were trying to like face the nail in this different direction, and I was like we just spent an hour just arguing over why it might or might not work. And I think the conclusion from that, though, like one of my engineers said this was just why don’t we just like make a quick prototype and test it? Because why bother spending all this time arguing back and forth when we don’t have any evidence to actually know? So that’s another key takeaway for me is just always just quickly test it rather than arguing over do I think this is going to work? Why or why not, you know, nothing is proven from that. And then my last piece of advice is to just always try the whole product all together, because for us, like, we had two separate parts. Right, we have the trimmer and the extension arm. We spent a lot of time just designing the trimmer without ever testing it with the extension arm, but the extension arm is so important because that’s the main selling point. You don’t need to bend down. So that was another thing I think would have just helped our prototyping phase altogether If we had been like okay, let’s make something rough, that doesn’t look quite great, but let’s put it on the end of the stick and just see how that works overall. So all time-saving things to consider, time-saving tips when it comes to prototyping and then I guess, as an entrepreneur, I think some piece of advice I think about is just, I think one and, by the way, like I feel like I was like a reluctant entrepreneur to some extent, because my field has always been design and I just I really like just thinking about people and what they need. So money, finances, legal not my strong suit until I actually started, you know, doing this company and realizing I need to learn these things in order for this to work. So you know some thoughts that I have. There is just one get yourself a great lawyer, get yourself some legal counsel, make sure you’re checking off the NDAs, the right contracts and having all of your legal things in line so that there’s no problems in the future.

Get a patent, get a trademark. These are all important things to consider. Another thing I thought about a lot was, just as an entrepreneur, also just thinking about equity between me and my co-founders and how do you incentivize people to work on something. And you know, I think my thought actually coming out of this. Well, I’m still in it I was coming out of this experience.

I kind of think that you want to motivate, you know, your co-founders to also work on it with you. So I’m more of being in the position that you know an equal split is totally okay, but also being clear having too many co-founders is also sometimes a little bit unclear as to, like, who is doing the work because there’s so many co-founders. So, for context, we had five co-founders at the beginning of this company and now it’s just me and Josh, and people’s lives will change and that is totally okay. And sometimes the way people’s lives change will no longer align with what the company needs. And at that point, just have a very nice conversation with the people on your team and just see, like, is this still working for you and is this still working for us and what do we think? Well, thinking from the perspective of having the company’s best interest in mind as well. So, yeah, that’s kind of my advice there for entrepreneurship.

Steve Melito: It’s amazing advice from experience and very practical. As I had mentioned at the top of the podcast, Soulo won a $50,000 commercialization competition award last year from FuzeHub and I’m wondering how did that help you? What did you do with the money?

Jailin Ke: Yeah, the 50K was actually so, so crucial to us. The first thing we did was actually molds. So when we presented at the competition, we just had a SLA printed prototype. So SLA is like this resin-based method to create plastic, and I had said, if we win this money, we’re going to go to manufacturing, and that’s what we did. So at the end of the year of 2023, we started to have the molds be created and now we have a fully realized product, that is, plastic injection molded that we sell on our website. So it’s been really critical. That money was definitely critical to get us to the manufacturing phase, because molds are really really expensive and the $50,000 helped us cover the mold cost.

Steve Melito: Okay, that’s good, and I was going to ask you more about the status of the product. So it’s mature and available for sale. Are you still enhancing the design or are you looking for other contract manufacturers, other parts of your supply chain?

Jailin Ke: Yeah, we are still enhancing the design, but probably that new version will be in a separate, like in a new upgraded release, probably a year from now, so it won’t be coming out anytime soon, just yet, but I think, yeah, right now it’s fully available on our website for anyone to buy. And we’re actually doing a larger quantity unit run because so far we’ve actually done some pretty small batches of production just to kind of like get a sense of like, how fast can we sell, like what’s our market appetite, I guess? And now that we have some validation we’re doing a larger production run. So that’s exciting. And then, after this large production run, we’re going to be upgrading the design and adding in a couple more new features as well.

Steve Melito: Yeah, sure. Sure.

Jailin Ke: We also just launched. Actually we have replaceable filing tips. This was a small little new thing that we just started doing, because we actually got customer feedback saying like I lost my filing tips, like where can I get more? And so now that’s also available for sale.

Steve Melito: It’s great, so don’t wait, buy now. How does somebody contact you to learn more about Soulo and your product? How do they find you? Or just go and place an order. What do they do?

Jailin Ke: Yeah, you can go to our website, LiveSoulo.com, L-I-V-E-S-O-U-L-O. Or you can email me also, Jailin J-I-A-L-I-N. At LiveSoulo.com.

Steve Melito: Jalyn, thanks so much for being part of New York State Manufacturing Now.

Jailin Ke: Yeah, thank you, Steve. Appreciate the opportunity to speak here.

Steve Melito: You got it. So we’ve been talking to Jailin Ke, the co-founder and CEO of Soulo, a Brooklyn-based company that was awarded a FuzeHub Commercialization Competition Award at last year’s New York State Innovation Summit. This year’s Summit is scheduled for October 28th and 29th in Syracuse, New York, and it’s an event that you won’t want to miss, as either an exhibitor or an attendee. To learn more, go to NYSInnovationSummit.com, and if you didn’t get that URL, don’t worry, just email us at info at FuzeHub.com. So, on behalf of FuzeHub and New York State Manufacturing. Now this is Steve Melito signing off.