Safe Outlet for Existing Electrical Outlet

“When I saw my 3 year old son walking around while holding those flimsy plastic plugs we used to plug our electrical outlets to “protect him”, a surge of mixed emotions overcame me and the following thought kept repeating in my mind: If these are the best we can do to protect our precious children from the possibility of getting an electrical shock or burn, then we have failed! Fast forward to about 15 months later, I replaced one of the outlet covers with my prototype and asked my son to please plug my phone charger (of course under my watch) and after many attempts he gave up and said “I can’t daddy, it’s not working!”. That was the moment I was waiting for!” recalls Sameem Monzaviyan, the inventor of the electronic device.

Developing inventions that can ensure better safety within people’s homes is one of our main goals at MAKO Design + Invent. Babies and children are always curious and love playing with every object they can find in the house. Looking around our homes these days, thanks to the ever increasing popularity and usage of electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops etc., we see device chargers and plugs all over the place, and in many occasions, children try to charge the devices they love to use when they run out of juice!

Child proofing electrical outlets at home is crucial to avoid any possibility of them being electrocuted, shock or suffer a burn. While there are many existing systems to discourage tampering, they are not actively securing the outlets at all times. Our client, Sameem Monzaviyan came to us with a very innovative yet simple electronic device and solution that will ensure that receptacles would always be secured by default without the need for any additional protection.

Time To Bring Our Old Outlets To The New Century

The patent pending invention is a tamper resistant receptacle case called Safe Outlet and is designed to be mounted onto existing receptacles in users’ homes. To optimize our safety features, the device was designed with a slide button system that requires being pushed laterally towards each other in order to align the slots and enable a plug to be inserted. Safe Outlet provides visual color cues to indicate if the outlet is child safe or is engaged or possible to tamper with. This will make it easy to visually scan all the outlets in the room to ensure the area is child safe from an electrical standpoint.

Another great advantage of this invention is its ability to be constantly secure at all times and not require any additional objects to be used for covering, plugging or obscuring the outlet. The sliding mechanisms are designed to be always in tamper resistant mode unless opened by the user. To ensure that children are unable to slide them the slide buttons require reasonable strength to be pushed inwards. One of the most important aspects in product development is to build a product with the aim to enhance user experience and strategically minimize user interaction. With Safe Outlet balancing both of these characteristics, users don’t have to make any drastic changes to the actual outlet nor replace the entire outlet to achieve safety. In fact, the average user could complete the outlet-makeover within few minutes without the help of a technician.

The next step for our client is to make this product available across North America. In the next few months MAKO will be supporting the crowdfunding campaign launch of Safe Outlet, where Sameem will be offering enticing perks and early bird packages. We can’t wait to see this product hitting store shelves and disrupting the industry.

About: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories. Also, our founder Kevin Mako hosts The Product Startup Podcast, the industry's leading hardware podcast. Check it out for tips, interviews, and best practices for hardware startups, inventors, and product developers. Click HERE to learn more about MAKO Design + Invent!