Previous Patents
1. https://www.google.com/patents/US8506360
Existing Patents
Potential Market
The market that we are aiming for is restaurants within the United States. In the spring of 2016, there was 624,301 restaurants in the United States. Out of everyone surveyed, 42% of the people had already looked into buying an automated wine polisher. That means out of 624,301 restaurants, there is a potential of 262,207 restaurants that would want a wine glass polisher.
Summary
Part B was a research of the previous products and current products to solve the problem of dirty wine glasses. We found existing products such as the wine glass polishing cloth, which is cheap but does not work as efficiently as the polishers. The Stemshine machine polisher which is extremely expensive, but works well. The glass Polishing Company Machine which is productive but still almost as expensive as the Stemshine machine polisher. Finally, the Final Touch Cleaning Brush is cheap and pretty effective, but you have to do all the work yourself. We also found 3 patents, the first was a wine glass polisher which steams to clean the glass as well as polish it. This makes it very expensive and not ideal for individual costumers. The second patent we found was from 1897, Henry Harley Pitt developed a glass polisher that used a furnace and a flame to melt the impurities from the glass. This invention was interesting because it was from over a hundred years ago and we are still looking for solutions to the problem. The third solution we found was a buffer pad which was pretty simple, but still a useful invention that works well. We also looked at our potential market. Since 42% of surveyors said they had looked into buying a wine glass polisher and there are 624,301 restaurants in the United States our potential market is about 262,207 restaurants.