Matthew and Kadriye Payne are a husband and wife team who started Karma Trading Co with a dream of providing ethically produced unique and custom made solutions for interesting problems at affordable prices. Karma Trading Co has been sitting dormant for a few years as careers got in the way and job changes happened but now things have settled down and we are ready to launch our first product.

Kadriye is a keen hoarder recycler, passionate about ethically and environmentally sound products and doesn’t like to waste anything, whilst Matthew describes himself as a destructive engineer and evil genius.

Imagine the scene – After starting the laborious task of spring cleaning, Kadriye is on her hands and knees reaching into the deep, dark depths of the unknown – the back of the can cupboard!

After eventually placing all the cans onto the worktop, and organising them first by contents, then by expiry date, you can almost see the pressure welling up at the quantity of out of date, wasted food sitting before her. She is positively fuming.

Having been nagged at (yet again) about not putting new shopping away at behind the old stock, the cogs were ticking away, Matthew had his first brainwave! He made a simple cardboard FIFO (First In, First Out) can rotator.The idea is simple. New cans go in the top and roll down to the bottom. Always take the can from the bottom of the rack and you will always be using the oldest stock first instead of pushing it to the back of the cupboard whenever you do the shopping.

The cardboard can rotator lasted for about a month and Matthew was sad to see it finally collapse into a pile of deformed, torn cardboard. Kadriye decided that a better, more durable version was needed, and the evil genius set to work plotting a can rotator that could be made from MDF and glued together.

After many hours using CAD software and lots of prototypes, Matthew produced with a nice, strong, reliable can rotator that fitted inside a kitchen cupboard and held up to 8 standard size cans. An added bonus was that you can take a quick look at the rotator and see exactly how many cans you have and what you need to buy when you go shopping. He had 20 of the rotators laser cut from MDF wood, glued them together and gave them to friends and family to test. They all loved them and have provided some very valuable feedback on how to improve the design.

And that is what brought Matthew and Kadriye to initiate a Kickstarter project – Open Source Karma Can Rotator. They have tweaked the design of the FIFO can rotator to be even more durable, more space efficient, and even stackable for that ultimate storage solution. Once the design has been finalised and is ready for production, the CAD file will be sent to anyone who has pledged as this is an open source project.

The Kickstarter project is to raise money so that they can purchase a small desktop CNC machine to be able to produce the can rotators in-house. Small run prototypes are expensive and it's very hard to find a machine shop that is willing to experiment. By purchasing our own CNC machine we will be able to produce unlimited prototypes and revisions "in house", produce small runs of the designs and develop new products. It will reduce the carbon footprint too!

The Kickstarter page gives full information about the product, and the pledges you can make to the project. The project is only successful if we reach our target of £2,150 within the 30 days. Pledges will only be taken if the project is successfully funded, and rewards will be shipped out within the timescale outlined.

Pledges start from only £1 so why not take a look and show your support? By funding this project, you will be helping Kadriye and Matthew get the tools they need to be able to design and build more products and you will be helping a fledgling business grow.

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