Over the last year, as restaurants were forced to close indoor and outdoor dining, people turned to more COVID safe alternatives to enjoy their meals, such as picnics outside. A number of articles from various media outlets, such as The New York Times, Business Insider and Today, describe how the pop-up picnic business boomed during the pandemic.
A group of 10 Cal Poly Industrial Technology students saw this as the perfect opportunity to design, manufacture, and sell their innovative product known as the QuickNic Table. The QuickNic Table is a uniquely designed wooden picnic basket that unfolds into a picnic table. This product reduces the number of items needed at a picnic, making your next outdoor gathering easy and effortless!
“It was really great working with the QuickNic Table team. They were awesome to talk to in the interview and were eager to share their experiences with us. As the team member in charge of audio and video, the QuickNic team was extremely helpful and provided me with an awesome marketing video that was really useful,” said team member Tula Pitcher.
QuickNic’s marketing video was one of the teams’ biggest successes throughout the whole project. Their prototype wasn’t fully completed until the morning the marketing video was scheduled to take place. After that, the team was finally able to catch their breath and move forward from there.
When asked about some of the challenges that the QuickNic team faced, finding adequate funding was one of them.
“We are financing all of this by ourselves. We started a GoFundMe where we have raised some money to help with prototyping as well as some of the initial materials costs. We put in a little bit in the beginning, but now that we’re buying all this hardware for the bulk material, we’ll probably be putting in a lot more for ourselves,” said ITP senior Henry Marks.
From our team’s perspective, the QuickNic group has received nothing but praise about their contribution to our story. This piece was not only extremely interesting, but the QuickNic team was very helpful and easy to work with.
“Working on the Word section has been my favorite so far, and QuickNic has been really fun to cover. The only real challenge I’ve faced is figuring out what angle to approach the story from, but that challenge is all part of the fun,” said team member Bailey Snow.
Another team member, Lindsey Zang, explained, “I was on interactive this week, which was pretty awesome getting to work with the QuickNic group since they already had a lot of really nice courtesy media.”
With such a passionate, dedicated, and hardworking team, it’s no wonder they were able to come together to create this one-of-a-kind picnic table and basket innovation. Our article dives deeper into the trials and tribulations that the QuickNic Table team faced, and how they overcame these obstacles to be successful.