The month of May has been quiet for sales following the mania of March/April.  However we have officially sold our first double Flexzies via the ebay shop, which was very exciting for us, and particularly for Tom!  The relative calm has enabled us to crack on with development work and the Grabzi Switch (a grab bar operated switch, believe it or not – see photo), has progressed to an advanced stage of design.  This is a neat new product that looks similar to Grabzi but has a pivoting handle which operates two separate switches, one forwards, one back.  We have made a number of custom versions of this in the past, so we are confident that there is a need for it.   The other project that has progressed very rapidly, following our experience with Splatz, is the Splatz XL (see photo).  This is a button holder for the commonly used “Big Red™” buttons, the big brother (sister?) of Buddy Buttons™ and Jelly Beans™.  We made successful samples early in the month and have now made production tooling ready for launch at Kidz South in June.

In other developments we are waiting for samples of Zip Pulls from our manufacturing partner, but they appear to be having difficulties (much as our volunteer, Andy, did) with the moulding of it.  This has caused some delay, but they seem confident that they will find a solution very shortly.

It’s worth mentioning here, of course, that we all participated in the TravelChair launch which was a resounding success.  Tom wore a shirt and tie, never before seen at MERU, and yours truly was given the job of escorting our celebrity patron, Laurence Llewelyn Bowen (see photo) who was most taken with the corned beef sandwiches.  Tom also went to the European Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition in Geneva with the TravelChair team and had a challenging week explaining it to potential customers without an exhibition stand.  His excellent performance at this event was much commented upon.

Finally we learned with regret today that April will be leaving us this week due to circumstances beyond her control.  As a placement student most of her work has been on the TravelChair and graphics but for this department she set up and ran our ebay shop and was involved in the redesign of all our instruction manuals.  We would like to thank her for all her work and for making us laugh a great deal!  Good luck for the future, and stay in touch.