Size, MuC
Nürnberg
“I always felt guilty when I ordered a cappuccino to take away,” says Susanne Gruber, the managing director of “My usefull Cup” (MuC).
In order to dampen the flood of empty paper cups, Gruber and her husband came up with the idea of practically reinventing the to-go cup with a simple but ingenious mechanism for folding. “The normal drinking cups to take with me were always much too big for my handbag, for example.” On a beautiful Sunday morning at the breakfast table, the family asked themselves why there was still no beautiful but practical cup that could be folded.
From then on, the Grubers never let go of the thought. For more than three years, the company founders made a pilgrimage from Pontius to Pilatus to find the perfect design. “We tried a lot, discarded some things and perfected the relevant things to perfection,” the makers report on the complicated development phase. Attempts with folding techniques would even have brought the inventors into contact with the Japanese art of origami. After all, the compressible cup should not only work well, but also look elegant in order to meet the aesthetic demands of modern society.
At some point, together with professional industrial designers, they would have figured out how the cup – without leaking and looking wrinkled like an accordion – can be reduced to a minimum. Once folded, the cup now shrinks to 30 percent of its original size. “In Sulzbach-Rosenberg in the Upper Palatinate, we fortunately found a manufacturer who can produce our new cup.”
The finished mug is now in stores in four different colors. No matter whether it is ocean blue or earth brown – a useful reusable cup costs 20.95 euros. To underline the mission for fewer disposable products, a marine garbage disposal is supported with each cup. Three percent of the cup price is donated to the maritime clean-up project “One Earth – One Ocean”, in which floating plastic is fished out of the water with ships.
But all beginnings are difficult, even for good inventions. The cup is still not on everyone’s lips nationwide. Corona also had its bad fingers in the game here because, for example, most trade fairs for new products fell through.
In order to present the reusable cup, which is as space-saving as it is environmentally friendly, Susanne Gruber is currently touring through shops and cafés. “A new customer in Fürth has just called me that two cups have already been sold in the tea shop,” says the company founder happily.
The business idea is not without risk, admits the sales expert. In order to put their vision into practice and to declare war on the disposable paper cup mentality, the Grubers would have had to take out a six-figure loan and put a mortgage on the house in Nuremberg. “We have invested a lot of money. But we are convinced that our new mug is the right way to go into the future,” says the woman in her mid-fifties, explaining that she doesn’t want to think about retirement or long-term vacation anyway. Instead, the whole family with father Martin and son Christian believe in success and pull together for the foldable mug. HK
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