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Cuyahoga Falls startup makes ‘toughest charging cable ever’
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: February 23, 2017
Design engineer Jon Fawcett had a small, but irritating, problem—the kind of problem that engineers love. The owner of a Cuyahoga Falls engineering firm that he took over from his father, Fawcett wanted a fixed way to charge his iPhone at night.
“I awoke one night in bed and couldn’t see my iPhone that I was using as an alarm clock due to the angle on my night stand,” said Fawcett. “Being a musician all of my life, I’ve used the typical goosenecks on microphone stands. The light bulb went off that we could probably make it customized for just the right rigidity versus flexibility to hold an iPhone.”
That was 2012. That idea turned into [fuse] chicken, the company that sprang up from Fawcett’s idea, and that went on to build what industry sources have described as the “toughest charging cables on Earth.”
Fawcett’s idea was to build a phone charging cable that could also act as a phone stand. The engineers at his firm got to work and developed a product they called “une bobine,” French for “a coil.”
Bobine, as it is called, wound up looking like a coiled cobra made out of dual-layered flexible steel. On one end of the meter-long cable was a universal “A” connector—the end that plugs into a computer or wall plug. On the other end, molded into the cable, was a piece of plastic that could hold an iPhone upright, as well as a lightening plug for charging the phone or connecting it to a computer. The cable was rigid enough to form a stand, and flexible enough to bend into any shape.
It was also virtually indestructible.
Fawcett had a product. He just needed a company name and funding to get it off the ground. The funding would come from an online offering, said Tederous. The name was something else.
“Like any new company, you have to own the domain name,” said Fawcett. “We were trying all sorts of rational company names and the ‘dot com’ was taken on everything. Out of frustration, I said out loud ‘The first two random words that come into my head.’ Then I said Fuse Chicken - everyone in the room burst out laughing with big smiles, it was available to register and the rest is history.”
The new company decided to seek online funding which, said Cory Tederous, [fuse] chicken COO, was “hugely successful,” garnering over $200,000 from more than 4,500 initial investors. Bobine became a Kickstarter hit, and [fuse] chicken was in business.
Positive reviews, new markets and new products followed, said Tederous, as the company continued to use Kickstarter to help fuel its growth. The company currently has six employees and a dozen products of different lengths and strengths. Tederous moved over full time from the engineering company a few months ago.
The company sells mini-USB cables for Android phones and is working on Bobine cables for the new USB Type-C cables but most of its cords are still made for the current Apple products.
The company primarily focuses on lightning cables for the iPhone for very specific technical reasons, said Tederous. All of the company’s models are certified to conform to Apple’s MFi standards. That is one reason he said that the cables are on the expensive side ($25-40), but is also a selling point. And it makes manufacturing easier because the products only have to conform to one set of standards, Tederous added.
Android phones have no such set of standards, he said, making manufacturing the current mini-USB connectors a hit-or-miss operation. As Android and other phones slowly adopt the USB-C standard, manufacturing cables for non-Apple phones will be easier, Tederous said.
MFi certification, which is expensive, also makes it harder to make knock-offs to the products, said Tederous.
Most reviews of the products focus on their toughness. Coolsmartphone.com called it the “toughest charging cable in the world,” a review echoed by Mac Sources.com. iPhone Live magazine said, “finally, a charging cable that doesn’t fray,” and numerous other tech magazines have given similar reviews.
During normal life activities, the cables can last a lifetime, Tederous said.
“Dogs can’t chew through it,” said Tederous and YouTube has numerous, some humorous, reviews of the product that show that it may be impervious to chain saws, may be used for pull-ups, can be knotted and can be run over repeatedly by cars, all without damage. In fact, the company has a limited lifetime warranty on its cables.
Tederous recently returned from the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and said that he did not see any products there that looked like [fuse] Chicken’s.
He said business is good but is currently better overseas than in the United States and the company is continuing to try to get its products in large American retailers. For now, U.S. buyers can order directly off of their website.
“The simple reason [sales are better in Europe] is because our incredible director of sales lives in the UK,” said Fawcett. “We are slowly expanding into more markets in the U.S. this year, though.”