CE-marking: not the most inter­est­ing sub­ject for a cre­ative entre­pre­neurs, who’d rather spend time on design, mar­ket­ing plans and chal­leng­ing online conversations.

But for any­one who plans to law­fully intro­duce a prod­uct on the EU mar­ket, like we do, CE-marking is of course not an optional sub­ject to tackle.
You sim­ply have to know which norms that your prod­uct must com­ply with, and make sure you take the nec­es­sary steps to met the stan­dard — or you could be fac­ing a costly recall and see your dream dis­ap­pear from the mar­ket faster than you can say ‘hepp’! That is a risk no entre­pre­neur should take.

For Mum­my­Mug, we started look­ing into this quite some time ago, and I must say that the quest for the answer to the magic CE ques­tion has been long and wind­ing.
It has taken me through erratic google searches, dis­cus­sions with var­i­ous labs, insti­tu­tions and experts; and even some brave attempts to chew my way through dense source texts of EU legislation.

I’ve had dif­fer­ent answers from dif­fer­ent experts and been pointed in all sorts of direc­tions, leav­ing me feel more con­fused each time — and not one step closer to where I had to be: with a well-structured Tech­ni­cal File ready for inspec­tion should some­one ask for it.

In the end, the solu­tion was just around the cor­ner: with fel­low entre­pre­neur Han Zuy­der­wijk who runs the online busi­ness CE-Marking.net from a base in The Hague.

Han  has a really fresh approach to CE-marking that can save every­one in prod­uct devel­op­ment a lot of money: the Do It Your­self CE-Certification.

Han is an expe­ri­enced CE-marking lawyer, who used to work for the Big Estab­lished CE-Marking Lab­o­ra­tory. Over the years, he saw how the CE-marking indus­try cre­ated a kind of mys­tery cloud around the whole CE-marking process, mak­ing clients feel that CE-marking is some­thing very com­pli­cated — which it is.

But what he really did not like, was that the estab­lished lab­o­ra­to­ries all seem to have agreed on a well-kept trade secret: namely giv­ing clients the impres­sion that there is no way around hir­ing the expen­sive The Big Estab­lished CE-Marking Lab­o­ra­tory to get the CE-marking organ­ised. And luck­ily, there cer­tainly is away around that costly process.

Han’s recipe is sim­ple: he starts with stat­ing the sim­ple truth that in almost 90% of the cases, the CE mark­ing reg­u­la­tions allow prod­ucts to be self-certified for CE marking. 

In other words, you can sim­ply do the CE mark­ing your­self. He does not say it is easy, but for a very rea­son­able fee, he does pro­vides a rich resource base, a pro­fes­sional scan and a prac­ti­cal tool­box with tem­plates and check­lists to help you help your­self: to struc­ture your work and process, with every­thing from under­stand­ing the basics of CE mark­ing, map­ping the norms applic­a­ble, make a plan for con­duct and prop­erly doc­u­ment a con­fir­mity assess­ment and set­ting up the nec­es­sary paper­work for your Tech­ni­cal File, that even­tu­ally will result from all this hard work that lies ahead of you.

Because hard work it is: using CE Marking.net is no short­cut. As for so many things that come an entrepreneur’s way, choos­ing for Do-It-Yourself-CE Mark­ing means sim­ply roll up your sleeves, put in the hours and the effort and get it done.

What makes CE Mark­ing dif­fer­ent is that it takes a fresh per­spec­tive to some­thing that seems com­pletely impos­si­ble at first sight. And per­haps even more ben­e­fi­cial is that CE Marking.net empow­ers you to know your game, know your prod­uct and become even sharper for the next prod­uct you hope­fully will develop some­time in the future. Not putting it in the hands of an expen­sive con­sul­tant that will bill you every time you call.

And the ser­vice helps you save up to 80% of the cost you would have had by using a 3rd party.

This, ladies and gen­tle­men, is why CE-Marking.net should be stan­dard included in your entre­prenur­ship toolbox.

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I need to find around 20 Mums — and Dads! — who would be will­ing to take part in a user test for Mum­my­Mug, which we will run in June.
It is part of a last val­i­da­tion test before we ramp up pro­duc­tion, and sim­ply con­sists of using a Mum­my­Mug at home for a week, and then telling me about the experience.

So, where to start look­ing for these test pilots? Of course it needs to be par­ents with small kids, who like to drink tea and cof­fee, and who prefer­ably are mem­bers a group that meets up any­way, so I can ben­e­fit from con­nect­ing with sev­eral peo­ple being in the same place at one time.

In other words: I need to find a play­group!  As Eleonore is already push­ing 5 and goes to school, the ones I used to go to are no longer active.

Some­one gave me the tip that many play­groups nowa­days are reg­is­tered on MeetUp.com.

OK, said and done: I sim­ply ticked in ‘Play­group’ in the search-field, and… voila, 2,615 results, includ­ing one in Ams­ter­dam. with 161 participants.It has a 5-star rat­ing, so it must be fun!

I’ve fired off an email to the group organ­iser, and now I can only wait and see if they are happy to check out me and my MummyMugs.

Because I totally respect that these groups are of course not for com­pa­nies to con­tact with­out per­mis­sion. I hope they agree to see me — to be continued!

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As Swedish as I and the Mum­my­Mug are, we also have another root, namely the region of Twente in the East of the Netherlands.

Why there, you would think? Well, you are look­ing at yet another lovepat; as I fol­lowed my Dutch hus­band Han back to live in his home town Haaks­ber­gen in 2007. Haaks­ber­gen and Twente  is thus where I started devel­op­ing my idea for the Mum­my­Mug. As a new arrival in a new coun­try, I lit­er­ally had to start from the begin­ning: learn­ing the lan­guage, build­ing my net­work and try to work out how on earth to start the adven­ture of trans­lat­ing the idea for the prod­uct con­cept Mum­my­Mug to a real product.

Today, the regional news­pa­per Tuban­tia has pub­lished a fan­tas­tic fea­ture arti­cle on Mum­my­Mug. It is unfor­tu­nately not avail­able online, as it has been placed in their spe­cial peri­od­i­cal De Onderne­mer (‘The Entre­pre­neur’). I take it as a great honor: not only is it great pub­lic­ity, it is — know­ing the Twents cul­ture — a real token of recog­ni­tion. And in Twente, it takes time and effort for a new­comer to earn his or her place.

You see: liv­ing in Twente is not just liv­ing in yet another part of the King­dom of the Nether­lands.  It is liv­ing in Twente.  This region and its proud inhab­i­tants, call­ing them­selves Tukkers, really have a sense of spe­cial com­mu­nity and many have lived here for gen­er­a­tions. There is even such a thing as a move­ment for the Free Repub­lic of Twente (in Dutch) — that  even hands out Twentse pass­ports to peo­ple who swear alle­giance to the Twentse flag. Yep, this is pos­si­ble in a coun­try like the Nether­lands, built on the prin­ci­ples of accep­tance and lib­erty. The Tukkers speak a spe­cial dialect — Twents — that really is so dif­fer­ent in vocab­u­lary and pro­noun­ci­a­tion from  reg­u­lar Dutch, that it is dif­fi­cult for some­one who has learned reg­u­lar Dutch to  under­stand it. And no won­der: an online dic­tio­nary of Twents count almost 1,700 spe­cific Twentse words!

So in today’s blog, I want to return the favour: I am also very proud of Twente!

The first per­son I came in con­tact with was Mar­tin Gre­vers, who designed the con­cept of the Mum­my­Mug. Read more about this cre­ative inven­tor and our coop­er­a­tion here. Dur­ing an inten­sive first year of prod­uct devel­op­ment, I also got to know a range of other cre­ative part­ners, such as the design bureau Indes in Enschede, teach­ers at the Indus­trial Design Depart­ment at Sax­ion Hogeschool and at Tech­nis­che Uni­ver­siteit Twente , and sup­port and advice from the Indus­trial design Cen­tre that have helped me come in con­tact with the right peo­ple at the right moment. I even got per­sonal advice more than once from the Mayor of Enschede, Mr Peter Den Oud­sten.

Wher­ever I have come, I have felt the cre­ative and entre­pre­neur­ial spirit of Twente and am very grate­ful for the con­tri­bu­tions of all part­ners that have helped and encour­aged me along the way. With­out the warm wel­come that Twente offered to a newly arrived Swedish woman with not much more than a good idea in her pocket, the Mum­my­Mug would prob­a­bly never have got­ten off the ground. And although I am based in The Hague nowa­days, I go to Twente often and still work reg­u­larly with my Twentse partners.

Thus — I’m proud to say, on behalf of Mum­my­Mug: Wij Zijn Tukkers — and proud of it!

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Yes­ter­day, I had the plea­sure of being inter­viewed by multi-venture entre­pre­neur and Damir Perge for an arti­cle for an online com­mu­nity for entre­pre­neurs, Entre­pre­neur­dex, where entre­pre­neurs can learn, share, social­ize, con­nect and con­duct busi­ness (and have fun!).

Once again thanks Damir for want­ing to tell my story — or rather, that of the MummyMug!

It turned out a real cool dis­cus­sion on the plea­sures and chal­lenges of entre­pre­neur­ship, prod­uct devel­op­ment and life in gen­eral. I am surely curi­ous to see what Damir will make out of it.

Let me sim­ply share one quote of Damir’s, which truly flat­tered me, espe­cially com­ing from an accom­plished prod­uct designer such as him:

‘The Mum­my­Mug is truly beau­ti­ful — the Maserati of Cof­fee Mugs!”

Now, who would not be happy with that?!

Espe­cially if you con­sider that ‘Crafts­man­ship, class-leading per­for­mance and a love of engi­neer­ing finesse: this is the com­bi­na­tion of val­ues behind the Maserati leg­end.’ Even to be men­tioned in the same sen­tence is thus an honour.

How­ever, as the mar­gin on the Mum­my­Mug will be just a tiny bit less than the mar­gin on a Maserati .….……

.…… I must admit that I do hope that the nom­i­nal annual sales vol­ume of the Mum­my­Mug will be some­what big­ger than that of this beau­ti­ful car!.

Photo source: Press Pack AutoRai2007

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Today I picked a favourite out of my RSS feed of var­i­ous blogs that I have started to fol­low. The title ‘How Green is your Office? Eco-Friendly Host­ing’ by Fam­ily Friendly Work­ing / Anto­nia Chitty (which I really rec­om­mend to all you Mumpre­neurs out there to check out, lots of good posts and use­ful advice) caught my eye. Anto­nia gives some good tips on how she has built up a good ‘green pol­icy’ : using fair trade tea and cof­fee, not print if it can be avoided it, get the kids to draw on the back of paper that is only printed on one side, re-use pack­ag­ing and and use eco-friendly office sup­plies (which appar­ently are pro­moted in the UK — well done! Are they plan­ning to open a Dutch branch as well??).

A new idea that she pro­motes via her blog is eco-friendly host­ing for your web­site — now, that seems to be an easy way to save energy with­out com­pro­mis­ing qual­ity or even feel­ing any ‘sacrifice’.

The post inspired me to add a few tips myself:

Check out a a Dutch inven­tion called Eco­font. It’s a clever, ‘hol­low’ font, where the let­ters are per­fo­rated by lots of small, almost invis­i­ble, empty cir­cles. This means less ink, about 20%, is used when print­ing! It’s free, just down­load, install and start sav­ing. Smart think­ing, don’t you agree! The font is very clean and neat, so should not bother any­one. Because let’s be hon­est: the entirely paper­less office is still a bit of an utopia, in any case to me. Espe­cially since my email (pri­vate) host crashed about a year ago, delet­ing all email cor­re­spon­dence from the about 18 months of my startup time for my busi­ness in the process. Now… I use Gmail.… and.… I am glad I have stuck to the habit of print­ing out the most impor­tant emails for pos­si­ble future ref­er­ence. You never know when you will need them, because you never know in busi­ness when some­one you think you could per­fectly trust shows another face.

My sec­ond tip is to check out a cool new Swedish com­pany called Cre­at­a­bles. They  develop smart prod­ucts from indus­trial sur­plus mate­ri­als and waste — and make great toys from it; not to men­tion mag­a­zine hold­ers and note­boards from used ten­nis courts (!)  and they have won a prize for a clever clotes-pin. And watch out, these guys are going global!

Find­ing Antonia’s blog­post also inspired me to think about the green pol­icy of Mum­my­Mug as such. Of Mum­my­Mug as a com­pany, as a prod­uct. After all, we are going to sell a plas­tic prod­uct, albeit one made out of an advanced mate­r­ial that more feels like ceram­ics than plas­tic. But I can under­stand if it might not appear as the biggest con­tri­bu­tion to human­ity to put one more plas­tic thingamy in the market.

Well — we do care! And we do have a plan. Let me explain:

* We will make the best pos­si­ble, con­scious choice of mate­ri­als that are as climate-friendly as pos­si­ble. The mate­r­ial we plan to use for man­u­fac­tur­ing of the Mum­my­Mug has been cho­sen for its stur­di­ness, so the mug does not shat­ter if it falls. That is of course essen­tial for safety. It has also been cho­sen for its ceramic look-and-feel: it is about as heavy as ceram­ics and feels ceramic to the touch, as I really believe that you as a user would pre­fer some­thing that is as close as one can get to your reg­u­lar, hug-me ceramic mug. Of course we had to reckon with the resis­tance to high tem­per­a­tures (at least 100 degrees) and of course the user has to be able to clean it with reg­u­lar deter­gents — noone wants a tea­mug with brown per­ma­nent stains, right? Last but not least, we obvi­ously had to work within the short-list of food approved mate­ri­als, by all applic­a­ble stan­dards. Thus we ended up with some­thing quite sturdy. It made it impos­si­ble to go for a bamboo-plastic or some­thing sim­i­lar. Nev­er­the­less, the mate­r­ial is still recy­clable, that I do want to point out. And the real good news are: the man­u­fac­turer of that mate­r­ial is in the process of mak­ing what they call an IQ-version, which has only a 25% car­bon foot­print com­pared to the cur­rent ver­sion! As soon as this mate­r­ial is ready for com­mer­cial release, we will switch to it to make sure the Mum­my­Mug is as lit­tle of a strain as pos­si­ble on our planet.

* We will con­sider sell­ing ‘spare parts’. The lid of the Mum­my­Mug con­tains a kind of vent. After pro­longed and inten­sive use, the per­for­mance of this vent will even­tu­ally dimin­ish, and should at some point be replaced to make sure safety is not com­pro­mised. That is after all what the Mum­my­Mug is there for. But to buy a whole new cup and a lid would of course be a waste — as the cup will still be in per­fect order. Instead, we are con­sid­er­ing sell­ing replace­ment lids, so that the life-time of the mug becomes… basi­cally end­less. And hey, then you can even pimp your mug in the future, by choos­ing a lid with a dif­fer­ent colour ;-)

* We will con­sider a pro­gramme for return­ing used mugs for re-use in pro­duc­tion. Now, imag­ine the sit­u­a­tion that your kids have got­ten older, and you feel you can safely start using open cups again. We’re still work­ing on the logis­tics, but the aim is to pro­vide ou could then choose to recy­cle the Mum­my­Mug in the reg­u­lar recy­cling for plas­tics — or send it back to us, so we can grind it and sim­ply.… make new Mum­my­Mugs to make other moth­ers happy. Trust me, this will not save us that much money, I realise that, but I feel would be a great way to feed back into the loop what belongs in the loop.

* The Mum­my­Mug will lower the need for expen­sive health care. You hope­fully know by now that the Mum­my­Mug is about safety: it is about pre­vent­ing that yet another kid ends up spend­ing two weeks in hos­pi­tal and gets enor­mously expen­sive, not to men­tion painful, treat­ment and skin grafts there, because of a scald from hot bev­er­ages. I believe that keep­ing that kid, happy, safe and at home instead of locked up in a process of enor­mously expen­sive, whater-it-takes kind of treat­ment and val­i­da­tion, is surely going to make a con­tri­bu­tion to a more sus­tain­able soci­ety.  And — a hap­pier one! ;-)

* Last but not least: we will cer­tainly make every ‘green’ choice we can in the office. Inspired by Anto­nia, I here and now vow to hunt down green office sup­plies in the Nether­lands, to choose a hybrid car when­ever there would be enough rev­enue to get a lease car for this busi­ness, to keep on bik­ing as often as that is fea­si­ble, to keep on print­ing with Eco­font and use double-sided print­ing.  We already have a very flex­i­ble organ­i­sa­tion, which means we do not keep an expen­sive large, energy con­sum­ing office, nor do we engage in exten­sive trav­el­ling, but for exam­ple arrange a lot of the work via Skype. And I  do believe one of the the green con­tri­bu­tions we can achieve by build­ing a net­worked society.

In other words, we will do all these lit­tle things, and strive for achiev­ing the big things and contributions,

to make our con­tri­bu­tion to  our joint effort to cre­ate a bet­ter cli­mate. I think being very con­scious is the best start, and that I believe I am

- hey, who arent’ these days?!?! Which leads me to the last, log­i­cal ques­tion: what are your best tips?  Look­ing for­ward to lis­ten and learn!

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Mum­my­Mug greet­ings from Paris!

Well, not exactly here for a work visit, that must be admitted.

But of course, as a entre­pre­neur one never stops working.…!

So, while wan­der­ing from the Eif­fel Tower to Notre Dame, I am am enjoy­ing keep­ing an eye out for the French way of doing things, and of course try­ing to imag­ine how the Mum­my­Mug would look here in the shops with baby items.

First of all — the name. Those of you who are French native speak­ers can per­haps give me some good advice here. it seems to me that even here in Paris, where I sup­pose it can­not get any more French, the Eng­lish lan­guage is slowly but surely mak­ing its mark.

Would Mum­my­Mug as a prod­uct name appeal here too?

Or, would French moth­ers and fathers pre­fer some­thing like.… Sur­Tasse? Tasse de Maman??

Sug­ges­tions welcome!

It strikes me here also that the cof­fee cul­ture is dif­fer­ent — a la fran­caise, every­thing is sim­ply a lit­tle bit more refined. Fine porce­lain cups, smaller serv­ings of neatly brewed espresso. Or a steam­ing Cafe Au Lait. Even my daugther Eleonore was treated to a cup of REAL choco­late milk at break­fast: no sug­ary pow­der quickly stirred into some luke­warm milk, but a slowly preared, foam­ing cup of per­fect choco­late, which we made together at the table from real cocoa and by alter­nat­ing hot milk with cold milk, served in two match­ing minia­ture jugs.

Now, that is a habit I might take up on the week­end, but feel we will not have time for on school rush mornings!

Greet­ings from Paris,
Miss MummyMug

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I have just booked a ticket to Dus­sel­dorf. I will go there tomor­row, to visit the REHACARE Trade Fair (www.rehacare.com ), which is in full swing already. It’s a play­ground for every­one pro­vid­ing solu­tions for mak­ing life of elderly and hand­i­capped per­sons a lit­tle bit eas­ier. Some­one thought: would not the Mum­my­Mug also be handy for elderly? Read more…

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today, we’re at Martin’s place in Eiber­gen, in the east of the Nether­lands. Mar­tin is the designer of the Mum­my­Mug, so thanks to him we’ve been able to go from idea to a con­crete prod­uct. We are now in the last stages of get­ting ready for pro­duc­tion, and what bet­ter way to spend a Sat­ur­day than talk­ing through the last mea­sures we need to take to get ready?! ;-)

Let me tell you some­thing more about Mar­tin, he has an inter­est­ing back­ground for sure. Mar­tin is really what you would call a clas­sic inven­tor — he lives in the coun­try­side, and has, with his own two hands, single-handedly built a fan­tas­tic work­shop where he can do every­thing: work with metal, wood and plas­tics, mea­sure pres­sure, build pro­to­types … he sim­ply makes things!!  One day, a woman called Cecilia with a crazy idea walked into his gar­den.…. as you prob­a­bly guess, she came there to con­vince him that he should design a styl­ish and safe cof­fee mug, that would be called the Mum­my­Mug. Since then he has been a key mem­ber of the team.

From the start, Mar­tin has been pas­sion­ate about form as well as func­tion, and had his first train­ing in art/sculpture design. Now you can under­stand where the beau­ti­ful shape from the Mum­my­Mug han­dle comes from — that is a result of Martin’s aes­thetic tal­ents. Since 1985, Mar­tin runs his own com­pany, Pro­tos Inven­tive Prod­uct Design, and he teaches stu­dents of indus­trial design in pro­to­typ­ing at a local uni­ver­sity (Enschede).

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Ever won­dered why some­one one day came up with the idea for a prod­uct like the Mum­my­Mug? And quit their job to try to make it from idea to mar­ket? Well, that some­one was — me! Check out the new pre­sen­ta­tion of the Mum­my­Mug Team, where we let you know a bit more about who stands behind this prod­uct and what dri­ves us to make it happen.

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