How E-TANK Was Born: Why I Spent 30 Months Building E-TANK——A Power Strip With RGB Lighting

Intro

Three years ago, I started working on something I had wanted for a long time but had never truly seen in the market.

I was not trying to make a slightly improved power strip. I was trying to build something I would actually want to leave on my desk instead of hiding under it. That idea eventually became E-TANK.

If you ask me where E-TANK really started, the answer is simple: I never liked power strips.

Of course I needed one. Everyone does. But for years, most of the ones I saw felt like purely functional objects with no real design consideration behind them. They were useful, but they were also the first thing you wanted to hide.

That frustration became the real starting point of E-TANK. I did not want to make another power strip that belonged under a desk. I wanted to build one that could feel like part of the setup itself.

Why I Wanted to Redesign the Power Strip
I Was Not Trying to Make a Prettier Power Strip
The Hardest Part Was Defining the Ideal Power Strip
The Real Difficulty Started After the Sketches
We Were Not Building One Part, We Were Combining Several Industries
The Prototype Revealed Even More Problems
Trial Production, Certification, and Mass Production
What E-TANK Means to Me
FAQ
Conclusion

Why I Wanted to Redesign the Power Strip

Many people assume this story started with a charging spec or a product category opportunity. It did not.

What pushed me to begin was much more basic than that: I was tired of how power strips looked and felt in everyday life. Most of them were designed like appliances you were supposed to tolerate. You bought them because you needed them, then immediately tried to keep them out of sight.

The problem is that desks have changed. A desk is no longer just a place to plug things in and move on. For many of us, it is where we work, create, game, edit, think, and spend long hours every day. We care about monitors, keyboards, speakers, lighting, cable management, and the overall feel of the space.

So I kept coming back to the same question: why should the power strip be the one thing that still looks like it does not belong there?

That was the beginning. I did not want to redesign the category because it did not exist. I wanted to redesign it because it had existed for so long without being taken seriously as a product that deserved real design.

I Was Not Trying to Make a Prettier Power Strip

If all I wanted was a more attractive power strip, this project would not have taken 30 months.

What became clear very early was that E-TANK could not just be a cosmetic upgrade. I was not interested in making a familiar object look a little better and then calling that innovation. I wanted to build a new kind of desktop power product, one that could combine strong everyday usefulness with a visual presence that felt intentional.

To me, the ideal product had to do three things at the same time:

Be powerful enough for a modern desk
Feel safe and stable enough to leave in sight
Look confident enough to deserve space on the desktop

That combination sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but it is much harder to deliver in practice. Most products in this category choose one or two of those goals and give up on the rest. Some are functional but ugly. Some are compact but limited. Some add ports but still do not feel like thoughtful objects. I did not want E-TANK to fall into any of those patterns.

The Hardest Part Was Defining the Ideal Power Strip

Before we could truly build the product, I had to answer a harder question first: what does a genuinely ideal desk power strip even look like?

That answer could not come only from my taste, and it could not come only from a list of customer requests. It had to sit somewhere in the middle between real-life usage and a product vision strong enough to move the category forward.

At that stage, E-TANK started becoming clearer in my mind. I knew it had to feel powerful without becoming bulky. I knew it had to feel secure without looking cold and industrial. I knew it had to look refined without sacrificing daily usability. Those tensions shaped almost every major decision we made later.

This was the moment when E-TANK stopped being a vague idea and started becoming a product with a point of view.

The Real Difficulty Started After the Sketches

Sketches can make any idea feel smoother than it really is. The real difficulty began when we tried to turn those sketches into something physical.

E-TANK was never the kind of product one factory could make well on its own. The teams that understood GaN fast charging were not necessarily experts in power-strip manufacturing. The factories that knew traditional power-strip production often did not understand the kind of charging integration we wanted. And on top of that, I also wanted lighting, materials, and visual details that did not belong to a typical utility product at all.

That meant the challenge was never just engineering or just appearance. It was coordination. It was translation. It was forcing different kinds of expertise to work together inside one product without letting the result feel patched together.

Once we realized that, we also realized we were not building a simple accessory. We were trying to combine capabilities that usually live in different product worlds.

We Were Not Building One Part, We Were Combining Several Industries

This is one of the parts of the process that stayed with me the most. People often think the hard part of a product is the main feature. In reality, E-TANK demanded that almost every detail hold up.

I wanted the surface to feel stronger and more premium, almost like the object had the presence of a machine you could trust. I wanted it to feel solid and safe, but not cheap, heavy, or crude. I wanted the product to look bold while still feeling refined enough to sit in a carefully designed workspace.

That meant ordinary supplier options were not enough. We spoke with many coating and finish suppliers before we found one that gave us the material character I had been chasing. At one point, the texture solution that finally felt right came from a supplier with experience in high-performance automotive coatings rather than the usual vendors you would expect for a product like this.

And that was only one detail.

The RGB lighting was harder to make right than it sounded. Transparent parts raised durability concerns. The plug design had to feel consistent with the rest of the product. The screws looked wrong. The base needed better grip. None of those details would appear as the headline of a product page, but each one would decide whether E-TANK felt complete or merely close.

In that sense, E-TANK was not built through one clean line of execution. It was shaped through a long series of decisions where compromise always looked tempting and almost never felt acceptable.

The Prototype Revealed Even More Problems

There is usually a moment in product development when the first real prototype appears and everyone feels a rush of excitement. We had that moment too.

Visually, the prototype was already close to what I had imagined. It looked real. It felt like the idea had finally left my head and entered the world.

But the excitement did not last very long, because a closer look exposed everything that was still not good enough.

The lighting was not where I wanted it to be. Some parts did not feel coherent with the rest of the design language. Some visible hardware still looked too ugly. The transparent sections needed to resist scratches better. The base needed a more confident anti-slip solution. Each issue was small if you looked at it alone. Together, they made it obvious that we were not finished.

Many teams would probably have accepted those gaps and moved on. I did not want to. E-TANK was not supposed to be a product we rushed out and fixed emotionally in marketing later. It had to feel right as an object first.

So the prototype was not the finish line. It was proof that we were close, and a reminder that close was not enough.

Trial Production, Certification, and Mass Production

By the time we reached trial production, we had already invested more than $200,000 into custom molds and product development.

At that point, E-TANK was no longer just an idea or even just a functioning prototype. It had entered the phase where the real pressure begins. A product like this has to survive manufacturing reality. It has to remain stable across batches. It has to stand up to testing. It has to earn certification. And it has to do all of that without losing the qualities that made it worth building in the first place.

We went through repeated rounds of trial production, validation, and safety testing. That process mattered to me because this was never meant to be a flashy object that only looked good in renders. It had to be something people could use in the real world with confidence.

Reaching mass production felt exciting, but also emotional in a quieter way. After 30 months of design, revision, problem solving, and doubt, the product was finally becoming real at scale.

What E-TANK Means to Me

When I look at E-TANK now, I do not only see a finished product. I see an answer to a question that bothered me for years.

Why should something we use every day still feel like it does not deserve design?

For me, E-TANK was never only about launching something new. It was about proving that a functional object people usually ignore can still be rethought with seriousness, ambition, and taste. It was about treating a power strip as something more than a hidden utility item. It was about building a product that belonged on the desk instead of under it.

That is why the time mattered. That is why the money mattered. That is why the details mattered. They were all part of turning a frustration into a real object that matched the original vision.

FAQ

Is this article meant to be a technical breakdown of E-TANK?

No. This story is intentionally told from the founder's perspective. The focus is on why E-TANK was created, what kind of product vision drove it, and what it took to make that vision real.

Why did the process take so long?

Because the goal was not to release a standard product quickly. It was to create a product that combined usability, safety, visual identity, and manufacturing quality in a way that felt genuinely resolved.

Conclusion

E-TANK began with a very simple feeling: I was tired of power strips being treated like objects that deserved to be hidden.

Everything that happened after that, from the sketches to the supplier search to the prototypes and production, came from the same belief. If a product lives on your desk and becomes part of your daily life, then it should be built with more care than this category usually receives.

That is the story behind E-TANK. Not just how it was made, but why I felt it needed to exist at all.