If You Have Roommates, You Need This Quirky Gadget

Crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo feature a wide array of products. While many are innovative ideas, there are others that seem rather silly or insignificant. However, these seemingly pointless products often fill a real need, and the campaigns are a way to bring a new idea into being that people might not have expected.

In 2015 alone, several Kickstarter campaign gadgets turned into wildly successful projects. G-Ro Revolutionary Carry-on Luggage raised over $4 million, for its luggage with extra size wheels, wth USB port, GPS, and charging station. UKEG is a pressurized growler, and a keg that regulates pressure so beer will never go flat, but keeps it cold. This also emerged last year, raising $1.53 million.

Crowdfunding sites featured far less complicated items as well, but many still saw the value. The Shower Rock for instance, is a suctioned stone that adheres to any shower surface, making shaving easier. There was also Stikbox, an iPhone case that transforms into a selfie stick. Then there was the Tub Shroom, a gizmo that claims to be the “World’s Best Strainer Hair Catcher”, for collecting hair in the shower drain.

Shlocker is the latest example of a quirky home gadget. Their angle is this: many people would agree that one of the huge disadvantages of living with others is having your personal items used without your consent. Perhaps even more unsettling is just never knowing if your things are secure. Whether it’s a standard razor or an expensive shampoo, you don’t want others freeloading off your nice things. But there has been no easy fix in keeping bathroom items out of reach from roommates. Shlocker claims to solve this.

The company’s video is comical, a masked “thief” is shown tampering with someone’s shampoo. I would hope that there’s something more valuable in my apartment than my shampoo.

Founders Tal Berke and Stephanie Cummings spent a year developing their solution to what has been a long battle in trying to keep bathroom products safe and secure from people you live with. “The idea for the shower locker was realized after many years of sharing a bathroom with siblings and roommates and having to hide certain products so that they would not be used,” Berke said. “One night after having lugged my products into the bathroom, I realized something should exist within the shower space to solve this common problem. After discussing the idea with my co-founder, we began constructing homemade prototypes, reaching out to product designers, 3D printers, and manufacturers.”

The Shlocker shower locker claims to be durable, holding up to 88 pounds. Founders tell us the locker is also a hygienic way to keep everything from hair products to body wash, organized and clean. Now live, the founders have a goal of raising $30,000 to bring it into production. Today, they have raised over $11,000, and a few weeks to go.

“The hardest part in getting Shlocker off the ground has been, like many other start ups, working within a tight budget,” Berke added. “It has been challenging to gather the resources we need, but it forced us to get creative and we’ve learned a lot that we wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Kickstarter provides the answer to their challenge. And Shlocker hopes to provide the answer to people’s bathroom issues with roommates. But a challenge Shlocker creators will face, like every crowdfunding campaign, is convincing enough people that they need a locker in their own showers. Time will tell if Shlocker can go the distance.