Our Story begins in 1988 like most typical stories…Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love and live happily ever after. Fast forward to 2017, our children are grown and it was time to spend their inheritance so boy (that’s me, Rob) had this wacky idea to give girl (Suzanne) 30 Christmas gifts to celebrate our upcoming 30 years together.  Great idea but implementing it proved difficult until I happened upon an FYE and stumbled across this monstrous display of something called Funko Pops. I wasn’t aware of what they were but there were seemed like a billion to choose from and there were horror ones and Suzanne absolutely loved horror. My problem was solved, and I quickly grabbed all the horror ones I could. Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, Billy from Saw, Ghostface, Chucky and a bunch more. I was golden…right? Little did I know these adorable little toys would take over our lives for the foreseeable future! We became obsessed with collecting these pops and were having a blast doing it! We began to grow our horror collection and started to add other genres, DC Women, 80’s stuff we grew up with, Witches and other cool things. The collection was becoming huge, and our kids thought we were nuts! The following Christmas I decided to have customs made of our children as well as have Suzanne favorite character “The Lord of Darkness” from the movie Legend made for her! She loved them but had what I would call a twinkle in her eye looking at them and looked up at me and said I can do this stuff! The next part of our Funko journey began and we started making Funko customs. The very first one we made was a Headless Horsemen. We had a blast making it and people seemed to love it so we kept going. Our goal wasn’t to sell them but more to just entertain ourselves making them. In 2019 a friend mentioned that Funko did a yearly custom contest at Fundays. We looked at each other and said why not, it will be a fun experience. We started to rack our brains to decide what we wanted to do. We settled on “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” We decided on the Horsemen because there were so many visual interpretations of what the Horsemen looked like throughout the years whatever pops we decided to use wouldn’t necessarily be wrong or right for that matter. 17 different pops and what seemed like months later we had our submission and wouldn’t you know it we actually won first place. We were blown away having our submission chosen by the CEO Brian Mariotti as the best one that year!   

 

 

 

For Christmas that year Suzanne and our boys decided to get me a 3D printer. I was excited with my gift and started to tinker with it but I was horrible and couldn’t get anything to print. I left the printer to collect dust for almost a year before I decided to give it another go (after of course scouring FB pages for tip and tricks) I finally got a few prints done and we started using it to add bells and whistles to the customs we made. I think in early 2020 Funko announced the Soda line and I remember thinking in box collectors were going to have a fit having to open these things and collect them oob, that was the moment we began to think of a solution for all those in box collectors.

In the spring of 2021, we began to formulate ideas for a soda display stand. We had designed a display that would include lights, magnets to lock multiple displays together and set positions for each of the 3 components that make up a Funko® soda. We developed a prototype and shared it within a few Funko® Facebook groups. We received positive response with a healthy number of inquiries and orders. As we began to produce them and get them ready to ship, we unfortunately realized the design was flawed and could not be produced in its current form.

One of the things we had wanted to do was create a display that would fit in a protector and even though that first idea wouldn’t have fit in a protector, we never abandoned that desire. We were stuck on the idea of being able to display your soda collection the same way as you would your POP!® collection and we really felt that would make it special.  As we went back to the drawing board, we decided that no matter what this iteration of this display would look like it would have to fit in a protector.

 

We now had the easy part down as we had the dimensions this new display would be and with that, we were off to the races. The first version of this new display was designed and produced within a week of the previous failure. It had a square can holder and a raised pog holder and fit within a protector...Winner, winner chicken dinner!  We loved it and were so excited, we shipped a bunch off to a few of the folks that we interested in the initial display and asked for feedback. In our haste we hadn’t tried more than a few sodas in the display and that was a mistake, but as they say live and learn.
We realized that the square can holder took up too much space where the figure needed to stand (that was also the feedback we were receiving) and it really needed to be round…back to the design software we went. We made the adjustment to the can holder and at that point we also decided it would be better to have slot built into the base for the pog rather than have one protruding that could potentially break during shipping. We now had the finalized version of this soda display stand. We were raring to go! The last thing we did was send out pictures to a large group of friends to get their feedback on. It was all positive and we really began to feel like we had something special. We started to create artwork to announce this new soda display stand when one of our wonderful friends, Jorge Ortega wrote me back telling us he loved the idea and had the perfect name for it “The Soda Coaster™”. Now we had a cool exciting product with an amazing name and the rest as they say is history!