Wax is Flammable! But ours is cool...

"Keep your edges and keep your snow!" That’s the slogan that has us off to the entrepreneur races. Cool Wax was officially born last night (3/2/10). For only $2 dollars you get a cube of our specialty wax that helps prevent your ski or snowboard edges from rust when you store them and helps prevent global warming by donating 50% of all proceeds to alternative energy efforts.

We met at Jake's around 6:30pm and piled into Kyle's car to go out to find supplies, that is when the adventure began. We were originally headed to Walmart, but Michaels just happen to stir our interest at the last second. We went into Michaels not having any idea what we'd be getting into other than we need wax. We found the wax... all 20lbs of it! We had no idea how much wax cost or how much you could get.

We sorted and debated through the different options and decided to go with the smaller 4lb block just to try it out. Of course as we start walking up to the register, we all get distracted and start wandering the store looking for more ideas and just looking. After spending a few minutes in the tie-dye section we stumbled across cheaper (Michaels is a rigged operation). So we ditched the block of wax for the cheaper... and some tie-dye (Bianca & Jake wanted shirts). Bianca also found some sweet wrapping paper to wrap up our product in.

WAX IS EXPLOSIVE!!! We finally make it back to Jake's around 7:30 and we started the melting. After a quick research on proper wax melting techniques, we quickly learned that wax actually has a flash point around the 300+ degree range. The vapors are extremely flammable and should not be exposed to an open flame. Use of a cooking thermometer is required to keep your boiling water at a safe 212 degrees. Weelllllll we didn't have a thermometer. Jake had an electric range, so no open flame, and we're adventuring entrepreneurs... so screw safety! Yeah, we went for it. We cranked up the heat on the stove and had the water boiling hot. We dropped what is called a "Pourer Pot" into the boiling water and then dropped in the wax, and our secret ingredient to say, into the pourer pot and started melting.

Once the wax was melted (looks just like water) we poured it into individual molds where it would cool. We could only melt so much wax at a time (what with the flammable fumes and all) so the process took some time. Kyle help speed the hardening process up suggesting we put them in the freezer.

During the melting and poring process something happened... something innovative even. We had bought dye to tie-dye some shirts for fun later and Jake decided to poor a little of that dye into the pot of melted wax. Now it's colored cool blue!!!! We're on a roll, even our packaging paper is a transparent blue!

Once the wax had hardened and was blue, we formed an assembly line. One cut the "packaging paper," one popped the wax out of their molds and the other packaged. When we started packaging, we found some defective products. When Jake was pouring the wax the water on the outside of the pot dripped into the empty molds and later created holes in some of the wax. And the blue dye doesn't dissolve well in the wax so there were some very odd-looking pieces. Out of the 100 we made only about 20 were defective. Luckily we can just melt them and try again.

Kyle is working on getting us labels printed and we'll be sticking um on tomorrow hopefully!

Cool Wax is real. It's no longer a worthless idea it's a product. Kyle has texted us claiming he sold 3 as soon as he got home and has more sales transactions lined-up. We learned that you have no idea how you’re exactly going to make something or what you’re going to do with it. You have to have a simple general idea about what you want to do and just go on an adventure to try and do it. We had a general plan and we had some idea how we were going to do it but everything little thing changed as we got deeper and deeper into the experience. We all found the fun and excitement of creating something and not knowing what was to come to be exhilarating. Last night was our first night as entrepreneurs and we have a feeling it won’t be our last.

... if we fail we still made some cool shirts!