Collide Rings – Microbusiness of the Month – March 2020

This month, we welcome Kristen and Gavin, the founders of Collide Rings www.colliderings.com

Collide Rings is a designer of two-part male engagement and wedding rings. Their mission is to enable couples to share in the entire journey forever, together. To do this they are transforming the social dynamics in the engagement and wedding ring space.

How did you come up with this idea?

Throughout our relationship, Gavin and I have loved doing everything together. We travel together, we go hiking together, we go grocery shopping together. I even go with him to get his haircut.

As our relationship progressed, talks about marriage started. The usual stuff like where we want to get married and where we want to honeymoon.

Talk then shifted toward being engaged and of course Gavin and I thought it a great idea for him to get an engagement ring because we wanted to show that we are engaged together just as we want to do everything else together.

What Engagement Ring options were there for men before Collide Rings?

As we looked into it, there really weren’t any good options for this. He could receive a wedding ring and wear it as an engagement ring, but that takes away from the specialness of receiving a wedding ring on our wedding day. He could wear a separate engagement ring and wedding ring, but he didn’t want to wear two rings.

What Inspired you to take the leap and create Collide Rings?

All of this research on male engagement rings got us thinking. Why hasn’t the engagement and wedding ring process changed in centuries? It’s become such an archaic process where a diamond engagement ring represents nothing more than a layaway purchase. That’s not what it should be about at all! It should be about two people being extremely excited that they get to share their lives together. They should want to share in the engagement experience and the engagement rings should be a tangible representation of this!

This lead us to think about how we can change this. I have a design background, so instantly my mind was thinking of unique ways to solve the inherent design issue. Gavin has a business and finance background, so his mind instantly went to how to form a viable company around this idea. With our combined skills and our passion to change the process, we decided to start Collide Rings.

How did you bring your idea to life?

Many design iterations and conversations with manufacturers and patent attorneys  have lead us to the creation of our two-part male engagement and wedding rings. We now give men the opportunity to purchase an engagement ring. They can wear this with their significant other throughout being engaged and share in that experience together. Then, when they get married, they can exchange wedding rings; however, our wedding rings fasten to our engagement rings to form one seamless ring.

We have brought our idea to life and we believe we are on the doorstep of a simple albeit revolutionary idea that is ripe for today’s modern times. People want experiences, they want equality, they want loving and long-lasting relationships and we believe that our rings wrap all of these ideals into one symbolic ring.

What are you doing to continue to spread the word?

We are working on honing in our social media presence whether that is by spending on Facebook and Instagram ads, keeping up with our posting, or interacting and engaging with our followers.

We are also in the process of launching a Kickstarter campaign to spread the word of our brand. So keep an out for when we launch that as we expect it to be soon!

What is a funny story about your company?

We have two loving pups, however when we were starting Collide Rings we just had our one whoodle, Rho.  You can see how cute and innocent she is in the picture (she’s the one on the left). As we were developing and fine tuning our rings, we went through many design iterations and many prototypes.

The first prototype we ever received, we were obviously exuberant about.  The first time we got to see our idea in real life!  However, Rho had a different idea.   

So anyways, we got our first prototype and we instantly wanted to take as many pictures of it as possible and send them to everyone we knew.  We went to go get our phones and left the prototype on the coffee table.

What we came back to horrified us. The bag that the prototype was in was ripped up and Rho had eaten it. First, we were freaking out because we didn’t want anything to happen to Rho. So we rushed her to the vet.  They laughed it off and said that she was going to be fine but we unfortunately just had to wait until the prototype “came out the other side.”

So a day later we received the prototype from a delivery method that was not Fedex.

Do you have any advice for budding entrepreneurs?

If you have an idea that you’re passionate about, don’t be afraid to take a chance and bring it to life! Throw your idea out and gather concrete feedback early in the process. And then continue to get feedback each step of the way. There are a lot of people out there that are willing to offer their help.

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Many thanks to Kristen and Gavin for this amazing interview. To learn more about this innovative company, please visit their website www.colliderings.com

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