For Immediate Release
October 01, 2013
October 01, 2013
Happy Owl Studio and The Cashbox for small business
Happy Owl Studio - a San Diego-based company founded in 2010 making a line of leather iPadTM cases - has recently launched a new line of products for the mobile credit and debit card processing market. “When Jack Dorsey announced Square, the first widely available phone-based point-of-sale platform, they seemed to be aiming mainly at the consumer market, but we saw it as a huge opportunity for small business owners,” said Devon Read, CEO of Happy Owl Studio. Having used traditional credit card processing in the past for a small camera rental business, Read was intimately familiar with the pains and pitfalls of traditional merchant processing. While he believed that Square was originally intended and marketed for person-to-person transactions - paying back a friend, or buying something on Craigslist - but he saw a much bigger potential. He was convinced that businesses would rush toward platforms like Square, but not with phones, with iPads - the most popular and ubiquitous tablets on the planet. It turns out Read was right - the whole mobile POS industry is expected to surpass $2 Billion in 2013 and fully 50% of Square's transactions are processed on iPads. “We could tell right away that because the card readers were intended for personal use, they did not on their own meet the needs of a retail business,” said Read, “and that is why we started the Cashbox line.”
Happy Owl Studio is in the business of designing and manufacturing products that integrate technology into daily life, so creating a product for the emerging mobile payment processing market was a natural step. The business originally made iPad accessories for consumers, including “The Clutch,” a leather iPad case sold through Apple. Chief Design Officer, Ryan Jordan said, “People loved The Clutch, it was a top rated case on Apple.com. But while we loved the exposure we got by partnering with Apple, the margins were too tight and manufacturing the cases in China was problematic for a number of reasons. We were ready to do something else.”
Witnessing first-hand the issues that came up when small businesses attempted to use the new mobile payment processing card readers at a juice shop nearby their studio, the Happy Owl Studio design team got to work on something that could improve the experience. The first issue the designers addressed was that the card readers would spin and squirm around and would cause the cashier to have to swipe cards many times to get a single read. The PayFrame was their solution, a bamboo frame that holds the reader firmly and creates an extended swipe track. Next they set their sights on a method to allow the iPad to be passed back and forth between the cashier and the customer to capture their signature and fill out receipt info while keeping the business’s expensive tablet safely secured to the counter - and the PayStand was born - a lockable stand that tilts the PayFrame back and forth. The Cashbox brings both components together and unites them with a cash drawer and a receipt printer to create a fully integrated POS system - all from organic, highly renewable bamboo. The Cashbox has a large space facing customers for custom laser engraving of the business name, logo or whatever they chose.
“The response to the Cashbox has been fantastic” Read says, “but we were definitely aware that a high number of our potential customers were being turned away by our prices. Building them using local, talented wood-workers out of a pretty expensive material - at least compared to oil-based plastics - has definitely put a premium on our price.” So they set out to find a creative way to be able to compete with other less expensive, imported stands.
They found their solution in a reseller-partnership with Atlanta-based Flat Rate Processing. Most of Happy Owl’s Cashbox customers use Square’s card reader and software, which means they must also use Square’s credit card processing service - but there are a number of iPad-based POS software platforms that don’t come with their own card processing - the customers interested in the features those particular apps offer can chose to have Happy Owl provide them with processing service with simple flat rates and get a hefty discount on their Cashbox hardware, as much as 50% off. So Cashbox customers are able to save money on their initial purchase, subsidized by fees that they will have to pay one way or the other - and save money on those fees - their rates are highly competitive, varying between 1.90%-3% depending on a number of factors relating to each businesses specific processing needs.
Happy Owl Studio is in the business of designing and manufacturing products that integrate technology into daily life, so creating a product for the emerging mobile payment processing market was a natural step. The business originally made iPad accessories for consumers, including “The Clutch,” a leather iPad case sold through Apple. Chief Design Officer, Ryan Jordan said, “People loved The Clutch, it was a top rated case on Apple.com. But while we loved the exposure we got by partnering with Apple, the margins were too tight and manufacturing the cases in China was problematic for a number of reasons. We were ready to do something else.”
Witnessing first-hand the issues that came up when small businesses attempted to use the new mobile payment processing card readers at a juice shop nearby their studio, the Happy Owl Studio design team got to work on something that could improve the experience. The first issue the designers addressed was that the card readers would spin and squirm around and would cause the cashier to have to swipe cards many times to get a single read. The PayFrame was their solution, a bamboo frame that holds the reader firmly and creates an extended swipe track. Next they set their sights on a method to allow the iPad to be passed back and forth between the cashier and the customer to capture their signature and fill out receipt info while keeping the business’s expensive tablet safely secured to the counter - and the PayStand was born - a lockable stand that tilts the PayFrame back and forth. The Cashbox brings both components together and unites them with a cash drawer and a receipt printer to create a fully integrated POS system - all from organic, highly renewable bamboo. The Cashbox has a large space facing customers for custom laser engraving of the business name, logo or whatever they chose.
“The response to the Cashbox has been fantastic” Read says, “but we were definitely aware that a high number of our potential customers were being turned away by our prices. Building them using local, talented wood-workers out of a pretty expensive material - at least compared to oil-based plastics - has definitely put a premium on our price.” So they set out to find a creative way to be able to compete with other less expensive, imported stands.
They found their solution in a reseller-partnership with Atlanta-based Flat Rate Processing. Most of Happy Owl’s Cashbox customers use Square’s card reader and software, which means they must also use Square’s credit card processing service - but there are a number of iPad-based POS software platforms that don’t come with their own card processing - the customers interested in the features those particular apps offer can chose to have Happy Owl provide them with processing service with simple flat rates and get a hefty discount on their Cashbox hardware, as much as 50% off. So Cashbox customers are able to save money on their initial purchase, subsidized by fees that they will have to pay one way or the other - and save money on those fees - their rates are highly competitive, varying between 1.90%-3% depending on a number of factors relating to each businesses specific processing needs.
