After roughly a year and a half of product design and user testing, the LapSnap shopping basket — designed specifically for wheelchair users — is officially available to the public.
The company Includesign, which was founded by three Brown University graduates, unveiled its first product through a Kickstarter campaign last month, with the goal of raising $10,000 to cover the company’s first batch of LapSnaps. As of mid-June, the Kickstarter had already surpassed its goal and has now raised over $12,800.
The Kickstarter goes until July 12, and the company hopes it will raise even more by the time it's done.
“People have been really supportive,” Diana Perkins, CEO of Includesign, told Rhode Island Inno. “We have been mostly focusing our efforts on this first product because it’s been just this for a year and a half so to have it actually come to fruition, still, honestly, has not 100% sunk in yet.”
The LapSnap is a 12.5-by-16.5-inch shopping basket designed with a fabric cover, a hard base and a layer of foam on the bottom, so the basket doesn’t leave red marks or dig into a person’s legs. The product has a strap that can be attached behind the user’s back, under their leg or through the arm of a wheelchair. It’s also fully collapsible and can hold about a week’s worth of groceries.
Perkins and Includesign CFO Chloe Rosenberg first came up with the idea during their senior engineering capstone class at Brown. The two had first thought about making luggage for wheelchair users, but their professor, Sarah Skeels, who teaches in the public health department at Brown and who is also a wheelchair user, said she considered grocery shopping a bigger pain point for her.
The key to the team’s success, according to Perkins, really goes back to Includesign’s commitment to user testing and designing products for disabled people with disabled people. Perkins said Includesign spent four months just testing the product with wheelchair users.
“That’s a huge part of our company ethos and our values,” she said. “All of our user testers are really wonderful and have been huge supporters for us, and we got so much good feedback. It really helped us improve the product and have that much more faith in our design that it was going to be good and it was going to be useful. It's a lot easier to get buy-in from our community when you know your product is actually going to be good.”
LapSnap's rollout, retail
People who donate $100 or more to the KickStarter will be among the first to own a LapSnap, or they can donate one to the organization RAMP (Real Access Motivate Progress), which will donate the LapSnap to a wheelchair user who may not otherwise be able to afford one.
With the rollout of the LapSnap off to a good start and the product now patent pending, Perkins said Includesign will continue to focus on getting the LapSnap out to the public. Following the Kickstarter, the LapSnap will be available for sale on Includesign’s website. Additionally, Perkins said the product will be available at a store in the Palisades Center Mall in West Nyack, New York, that specifically promotes products and services for people with disabilities. The shop is run by the organization Bridges, a nonprofit dedicated to advocacy and leadership on behalf of people with disabilities.
Perkins also said she wants to try and partner with different grocery chains to see if they can make the LapSnap available at the front of their stores along with shopping carts and baskets, so it's more accessible to disabled consumers.
The LapSnap is the first in what Perkins hopes will be a whole line of products for people with disabilities. Includesign’s next product will be a similar LapSnap, but for smaller wheelchair users and people who use walkers and also have difficulty carrying things.
Perkins said the team plans to use the same user-testing process that has so far put the LapSnap in high demand.
