21 September 2020

"Bearly Surviving" No-Spill Mugs - Totally Calfornian, Totally Nautical

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I continue to try and figure the wizardry The Kid Sister used to locate the replacement to my beloved old warrior of a no-spill coffee mug (see missive the last). But, along the way, I found a thing that filled in the historical narrative a bit, and I found it in an unexpected place: a site in New Zealand.

On the site New Zealand Pottery, an enthusiast site for Kiwi lovers of all things pottery, a user named Jeremy Ashford on the 21st of February, 2016 (I'm guessing at the year; the post is merely dated Sunday, 21 Feb with no concession as to year and the most recent year I can find is 2016; crossing that datum with the 2011 sign-on of said user and the only Sun 2/21 I can find during the user's term of residency there would be n 2016 AND MOVING ON) posted a rather interesting article beginning with the sighting of a model by the stoneware maker Crown Lynn (which defuncted in 1988), a model 1448, which shares the same low-center-of-gravity profile as my mug and all the Bearly Surviving mugs I've seen.

His informal investigation of the lineage of the design lead him to the brand Bearly Surviving and to one of the creators and marketers of the original design, Tres Feltman. It was his partner, Dirk Langer, the both of them grad students in Design at UCLA, who created the first design on the potter's wheel, and it went on from there.

From the article, in Tres Feltman's own words of reply to the author:

Dirk and I met while attending graduate school at UCLA. While pursuing our graduate degrees in Design we  began experimenting with different mug shapes to bring to market. Dirk actually created the first No Spill No Slide mug on the potters wheel. The original mold was made off the mug he threw on the wheel. We put decal graphics of surfers and surfing on the mugs and sold them to surf shops up and down the California coast. We originally sold the mugs under the name "Bearly Surviving" and later we incorporated under the name Feltman Langer, Inc.

We soon realized that the Surf Industry, at that time, was very small and most surfers didn't have the disposable income they have now. I was crewing on a sailboat at the time and realized sailers had more money than surfers and the boating industry was immensely bigger than the surf industry. That's when we began putting nautical graphics on our mugs and our little company really took off.

I have also subsequently found out that their company's mugs were marketed both under the Barely Surviving and Feltman Langer brands.

The practicality of the design to anyone in both the worlds of surfing or yachting is self-evident. The savvy of divining the right market is admirable, and the success of the design is well-attested to by the fact that it's still being traded heavily on eBay, almost as a collectors item, and that a twenty-something finding himself in Seattle in the mid-80s who will come no closer to sailing in his life than watching Gilligan's Island found the design appealing enough to own for thirty-five years. 

It also explains why so many of these mugs have nautical attire. 

So. A bright idea by two UCLA grad students in the 70s goes round the world, copied by a NZ manufacturer and maintains ... and even makes its entry into science fiction television ... what? Yes. It's reputedly been seen on Star Trek ...

But they who are interested can read the whole of it at the author's article at https://www.newzealandpottery.net/t7237-no-spill-no-slide-californian-origins-of-the-1448-mug. There are links you can copy and paste but I won't testify to their effectiveness; consider it an adventure, thrillseeker!

Also, get a load of what I was able to get on a Google web search of bearly surviving mug under the 'Shopping' tab. Four pages worth. And here's one for feltman langer mug. About as many. There's still a constituency.

I'm one.

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