Problem

Peanut butter, jam, pickles, honey, olives, instant coffee. Half the kitchen arrives in glass, and the glass is the best part: thick, clear, a screw lid that actually seals. Then the jam runs out and the jar goes in the bin.

Some of them get a second life holding spices or buttons. Most don’t. It always bothered me, because a jam jar is almost exactly the size and shape of a coffee mug. The only thing missing is a handle.

Seven empty jars side by side, no two alike: a clip-top storage jar, a tapered sauce bottle, a hexagonal jam jar, a squat square jar, a round-bellied pickle jar, a straight honey jar and a tall narrow bottle

So the brief I gave myself at Gemklip, the consumer brand of Teqzo Consulting in Bangalore where I was working, was simple: put a handle on a jar you already own. The catch was in “a jar you already own”. No two are the same shape, and whatever held the handle on had to work on all of them.

Process

We went through the obvious ways to stick a handle to glass and threw each one out. Glass fusing needs a kiln and ends with one handle on one jar forever. Super glue fails the first time someone runs it under a hot tap. A plastic clamp only fits the jar it was designed for. What did fit every jar was something stretchy: a band that grips whatever it is pulled over, with a handle held under it.

The first prototype took an afternoon and cost nothing. I sawed the handle off a cheap plastic cup and borrowed a couple of silicone sleeves that came as add-ons for a Bluetooth speaker. The studio pantry had no shortage of empty jars.

The studio desk mid-prototype: a red plastic cup with its handle sawn off, a yellow silicone band, pink plastic shavings scattered across the paper and an empty jar on the windowsill behind

The red cup with its handle cut away, next to a steel ruler Two ribbed silicone speaker sleeves, one blue and one yellow

Slide the flat root of the handle under the band, stretch the band over a jar, done. It held a full jar of tea better than it had any right to.

An empty hexagonal jam jar with a fruit-print lid The same jar wearing the yellow band with the red handle tucked under it The prototype filled with black tea, a Tetley tag hanging over the band

Then it quietly became the studio’s favourite mug. People used it for their morning tea without being asked to test anything, and it started conversations every time someone new walked in. That was the real proof of concept, more than any load test.

A colleague smiling mid-sip from the jar prototype at his desk, index cards pinned to the wall behind him

Living with it taught us things we had not designed. The lid was still there, and it turned out to be useful. Flip it over and it is a coaster, or a saucer for two biscuits. Screw it back on and the mug becomes a sealed take-away cup you can drop into a bag.

The jar standing on its own upturned lid as a coaster The upturned lid holding two round biscuits like a saucer A hand carrying the jar of tea by its handle with the lid screwed on

Turning a hack into a product meant pinning down four things: the path the handle takes out from the glass, its profile in the hand, how it bears against the jar, and the band. I sized the band from a 70mm jar, a common size in the pantry: a 220mm loop that stretches onto anything close to it. The handle got a flat back plate that sits flush against the glass under the band, so the load spreads across the silicone instead of pulling on one point.

Hand sketches of handle profiles with dimensions, and the band drawn flat with its 220mm length worked out from a 70mm jar The handle in CAD: a flat back plate with a rounded D-shaped grip

We printed it, wore it on more jars, and adjusted.

A 3D printed translucent handle held to a plain jar by a blue ribbed band

Once the shape stopped changing, it went to a mould. The handle is injection moulded in food-grade ABS. A mould is expensive before it has made a single part, which is why the pre-order came first (more on that below).

The two halves of the aluminium injection mould for the handle, a micrometer beside them and a freshly moulded yellow handle still on its runner

Solution

Jarry is two parts: a grey silicone band and a coloured ABS handle. Stretch the band around almost any jar and the handle is locked against the glass. Pull it off and it goes onto the next jar. It packs flat, so it ships cheaply, and the jar is the part you already have.

Jarry on a jam jar with a fruit-print lid: a grey band with a raised chevron pattern and a yellow D-shaped handle

Three steps of fitting Jarry: pulling the band open with the handle already in place, working it down over the rim of an empty jar, and settling it around the middle

It came in six handle colours: yellow, lime, green, blue, purple and red. Each one ships on a card cut in the silhouette of a jar, so the packaging explains the product before anyone reads a word.

Six Jarry sets on their jar-shaped backing cards, one for each handle colour

A square jar with a wooden lid wearing a green Jarry handle

Impact

We launched it through a pre-order campaign on Gemklip in early 2016, so that buyers paid for the mould rather than us. The campaign funded the tool and the first production run, and Jarry has sold in the thousands since. Ten years later it is still on sale on gemklip.com, at ₹149.

The campaign images said it better than a spec sheet ever would.

Three jars wearing yellow, green and blue handles, seen from above, handles pointing outwards, with the words Better when shared A water bottle hanging from a backpack strap by its yellow Jarry handle, with the words Let’s hang out

It is the smallest thing I have ever shipped, and it taught me a lesson I have used on everything bigger since: prototype with whatever is in the room, then hand it to people and watch what they do with it. Nobody asked for a coaster. The jar had one all along.