If you still need to buy gifts for the important women in your life, you may want to tune in to The Wendy Williams Show today. You’ll get a list of holiday must-haves, and more importantly, see Kansas City startup Trellie receive national exposure for its first product, a fashionable call notification device that clips to bags and purses.
Style consultant and TV personality Lloyd Boston will join Williams—3 p.m. on 38 The Spot in Kansas City, but look at the show’s listing for other cities—in highlighting hot gift items for women, which is a spotlight most startups rarely find. But it’s all part of the plan for co-founders Claude Aldridge and Jason Reid.
“We’ve kind of always tried to think outside of Kansas City,” Aldridge told Silicon Prairie News. “We always felt it was important to grow our roots here, but to be successful we’d have to get out of our comfort zone. That’s how we came about working with the two people we’re working with to get this appearance.”
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There’s nothing guaranteed for daytime TV, he said, but they expect they’ll make the final cut everyone sees as the list is the featured part of the day’s show. The co-founders made it happen through inroads with those new relationships, and then went through a formal selection process.
It’s all only the beginning for Trellie though, Aldridge (far left) said. The first product runs on two triple A batteries and works through Bluetooth devices to ring or light up on the outside of a bag so that buried cellphones don’t translate into missed calls. The device also blinks for an hour when a call was missed. And after a lot of research into the industry, Aldridge and Reid (far right) have found there’s a wide-open race to create tech designed for women.
“It’s truly remarkable that people forgot about females when designing technology,” Aldridge said. “What we found is that women care for much different things. Men are looking for loads of features. Women are looking for simple, stylish ways to save time and add efficiency.”
So, what does that mean for Trellie and women everywhere? Expect to see more and more products come out from the KC startup. It’s currently in the research and development stage for its second product and has plans for more after that.
“Women don’t really wear the same thing anything from day to day,” Aldridge said. “We want to find solutions that adapt to everyday use.”
For more on Trellie, read our previous coverage: “With a fashion accessory, Trellie aims to keep women better connected.”
Credits: Product photo from Trellie.com. Claude Aldridge and Jason Reid photos from Trellie.com.
