Sometimes, Old Products Can Find New Exciting Applications - CHAPTER TWO

It's fascinating to look at our product line to understand how you, our customers, determine the best use for what we manufactured. Sometimes it is miles away from our original thoughts! Let me share with you two interesting examples.

I am old enough to remember similarly shaped Erlenmeyer-style containers being the routine urine sample container. Our B352 specimen containers were no exception and were designed originally for that purpose. Its flask shape is representative of lab work. My first employer used this shape as their logo. Despite its lovable poetic curves, it was quickly recognized that another more cylindrical-shaped container would be more practical to collect urine samples.

Did the product disappear? Not at all. Someone spotted it and felt it could be put to better use as a drosophila culture dish! Drosophila Melanogaster, a type of fruit fly, is very commonly used as a model for genetic studies, especially regarding immunity. Our researcher saw our B352 container, ditched the cover, replaced it with a cotton ball, and Voilà! An autoclavable, extremely stable, disposable, and unbreakable drosophila culture bottle!

My second story took place at the same time as Simport was launching a dilution tube matrix, we called Biotubes™, one of our customers was starting to use a new microbial detection system for food.

Our 1,2 ml tubes in an 8 x 12 rack matrix were intended to dilute samples in series to work with the appropriate concentration. Our customer saw this, tested the tube in the 96-well heating block that is used to prepare the samples for the PCR test that follows and realized that the tubes, the racks, the sterility, everything matched! It was the perfect product for the application. Later, the manufacturer of the kits began to identify this Simport product as one of the components to use for this test. The rest is history.

We are grateful to these visionary clients with fertile imaginations. This is why we make this appeal to you. Do you have other stories of unusual or unpredictable uses of our products? Share them with us here and we'll tell the world. Your story might be the solution someone was looking for.