Tea Mailer - Specialmoves
Tea Mailer
Specialmoves R&D
Tea is the drink of choice here at Specialmoves. We drink it by the bucket load. Rather than send an all-staff email to let everyone know that tea is in the pot, we decided that thumb recognition could speed the process up.
Back when we were small, making tea was easy. Someone would fancy a cuppa and ask the other five or six people in the studio if they wanted one too. They’d then proceed to make and deliver said tea. Usually to the correct pantone reference and sweetness.
As we grew things got a little more complex. It’s not easy to make tea for 15 people and remember who has sugar and who will only drink it if they have curd bean milk. And let’s not get started on the coffee drinkers.
Lots of ideas were bandied about, like preference lists (always get messed up when left in the kitchen) and an urn (hardly environmentally friendly). Then one bright spark hit on an idea. Teapots.
It’s obvious really, you make a pot of tea, pour yourself a cup and then send an email to the staff mailing list telling everyone what you’ve done. It became usual to add a picture of a shaved cat or a dog wearing a hat. Why not?
This solved our problem. No longer did you have to remember all the pesky tea details, just send one email and people could help themselves. It couldn’t be easier. Well as it turns out it could.
Enter the T-Mailer.
The T-Mailer is an auto T-Mail machine using fingerprint recognition for authentication.
How does it work? Well, as you make your pot of tea, instead of having to go back to your seat and remember to tell everyone in the office that tea is ready, you simply place your thumb on a reader and the system does it all for you. Brilliant.
It’s simple (just place your thumb on a reader), contextual (it’s right there when you’re making the tea) and it saves seconds from your day. The best feature however is that it downloads and attaches a random silly cat picture from Google (there are a lot of them).