FAIL!
We put a prototype in the oven. My sauna tops out at 195°F, so we cranked it to 220°F. If it could survive that, it could survive anything.
We eagerly looked through the glass of the oven, counting down the minutes until we could test it.
Ding ding, it’s time to retrieve our masterpiece. I reach in with my bare hand and instantly pull it back. Did I grab the rack instead of the bottle?
The bottle was hot – seriously hot… to the point where even the most trained mother’s hand couldn’t withstand the heat. We weren’t sure we had a product anymore.
Someone was going to have to tell Joe.
Then we realized an oven was a terrible stand-in for a sauna. Dry radiant heat from all sides is nothing like sitting in a cedar box where the heat rises and the air moves. We’d been testing the wrong thing. Phew!
We are so back.
So I took the 3 mm bottle into my building’s sauna for weeks. Empty, top bench, every session. No water inside on purpose – cold water would insulate it from the inside and we wanted the hardest version of the test. Just me and a hand-wrapped prototype sitting where nobody’s water bottle goes.
Everyone at my building’s sauna brings their bottle into the sauna and leaves it on the floor, or just outside the door. Me? I bring that thing with me to the top bench.
After a session it’s slightly warm. You can grip it with your whole hand, no problem. Is it cold? No. And we stopped wanting that. It’s meant to be touchable – warm the way a wooden handle is warm, not hot the way everything else in there is hot.
The glue held. The cork didn’t move, and the hand-cut seam didn’t come apart at all.
We are close.
Our ugly prototype worked? Are we on to something?
The cork can’t stay ugly forever, though.