As an Army paratrooper turned lawyer turned entrepreneur, Kristin Burrell’s career has led her on some interesting adventures. Her latest venture, Redonkulary, is a game that started as just a way to keep her daughters entertained on trips.
Now, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, Burrell is selling the game in small retailers and online.
Redonkulary works by having a designated “donkster” who invents a word using word parts from three different cards. The other players create silly definitions for the word and the donkster chooses a favorite one.
Burrell came up with all the word parts herself. “The spell check on my computer goes crazy when I’m working on this,” she said.
She launched the Kickstarter campaign in May and was fully funded soon after launching. By the time the campaign ended a month later, she had doubled her funding goal. She’s sold hundreds of games since June, she said.
The name of the game
Coming up with the game’s name was one of the hardest obstacles. Her family originally called it “the dictionary game,” but the name was stale, and she wanted something that represented the creativity of the game. She did Internet searches of about 50 different names she had come up with. Some were already taken. Others had bad connotations she didn’t previously know about. Her daughter was the one who inspired the final name.
“One day my daughter came home and said the word ‘redonkulous’ and I’m like, ‘Eureka,’” Burrell said
“Redonkulous” is slang for “ridiculous.” Burrell combined the slang term with “dictionary” to get the final name – Redonkulary.
As an entrepreneur, Burrell has seen some setbacks. She had trouble finding a manufacturer who could produce her idea. Health problems forced her to stop working on the game for several months. She had to ask others to teach her to use social media. And finding a reliable designer was difficult.
But her time in the Army and childhood as the daughter of an Army officer taught her the importance of “self reliance and resiliency moving forward in the face of adversity.”
The stress of getting the game produced and into stores wore on Burrell emotionally. “I would think sometimes it would be so much easier if I went back to practicing law; I could be making money.”
She didn’t have any experience starting a business, so she made regular trips to the library for a year to check out dozens of business books. At one point she had 47 books checked out. Some of those were for her daughters, but the rest were guides on topics like branding and intellectual property.
Because she could only renew the books several times in a row, she and her daughters would load up backpacks and head over to the library to check the books in and check them right back out.
“The librarians know us now,” she said.
Community effort
The whole project came to fruition through the help of Greenvillians. Local company emediagroup designed and manufactures the game. Toy inventor Ryan Hamilton helped in the development. Patent lawyer Parks Workman helped with intellectual property rights.
She also tested a prototype of the game on college-age students at a local game night and found they enjoyed the game and wanted to replay it.
Burrell says she makes a point to try to shop locally, and the first store to carry her game, The Elephant’s Trunk, saw her game at a convention and contacted her because the owner recognized her as a regular customer.
When she was trying to get her game in O.P. Taylors, she spent weeks trying to get hold of the owner. The store is based in Brevard, N.C., and the owner occasionally came to the Greenville store.
When Burrell couldn’t catch him in Greenville, she drove with her family up to the Brevard location.
The store was crowded when she went up, but she located the owner. He was busy helping people, but she asked for a minute of his time to make her pitch. He agreed, and when Burrell finished making her presentation, the owner wrote a check on the spot to buy three cases of the game.
She’s evaluating the possibility of getting into some larger retailers like Barnes & Noble and Cracker Barrel.
Thinking of the new ideas has never been a problem for Burrell. She said she often wakes in the middle of the night with an idea, grabs a notebook and goes into another room so she won’t interrupt her husband’s sleep.
She’s looking for her next business venture. Redonkulary is just one of her ideas.
“I have more,” Burrell said.
