Charlie

One-Hand Wonder

We’ve all been there. You’re at a get-together at someone’s house. The host opens your beer so swiftly and ninja-like, you’re not even sure what just happened. It’s the coolest bottle opener you’ve seen to date, and you’ve seen a lot. It becomes the topic of the party, and you have to have one of your own.

Thanks to Rush Dixon, you are now that host.

Dixon is exactly the kind of guy you’d want to design your one-handed bottle opener: He’s a talented architect, loves Pringles for their structural genius, and drinks beer.

“The world doesn’t need another bottle opener,” says Dixon, the inventor of Kebo. “There’s no other product out there that has so many iterations of it. So, it was a little insane.”

Insane and worth it.

Dixon moved to Charleston from D.C. in 1992 with his wife, Judy, also an architect. A slow market forced them to move back in 1993, but their love of Charleston’s buildings kept them determined to return within a year. Ever since, they’ve called Charleston home.

In 2001, after September 11th, Dixon and his wife found themselves at dinner at Hominy Grill. “There was a certain vibe in the air, so to be optimistic and hopeful, we made a list of the ten things we wanted to accomplish in ten years.” Within his list was to have another child, start a design company, and for Rush to design a product that he loved.

Flash to summer 2010. Their second child had come, Rush3 Studios was born despite a bad economy, and Dixon realized he only had about another year until his other deadline. “I knew I wanted to make something architectural and fun in design,” he said. At his grandmother’s house, he grabbed a beer and came across an antique bottle opener from the 1930s. He quickly became obsessed with its simplicity yet attraction and functionality, and knew what to do.

Dixon did a lot of research between that summer and his launch last Thanksgiving to get the sleek and fashionable finished Kebo he has today. He had many prototypes and learned the hard way about working with stainless steel. In other words, he drank a lot of beer.

Kebo—a new derivative of “Bottle Key”—is a shiny, architectural-looking, familiar-yet-distinctive design with a thumbhole trigger for easy one-handed pull-down use and a magnetic fulcrum for catching the cap and wow-ing users. “The uniqueness of it and the way it operates is the appeal,” says Dixon. Plus, it opens beer.

The Cary Grant-esque face behind Kebo is Dixon’s dad’s high school picture and perfectly fits the retro-inspired invention. “And it makes the story that much better,” adds Dixon.

Rush3 Studios has some other irons in the fire—like one high-expense endeavor inspired by his 9-year-old son that involves plastic. But right now, Kebo is driving all of Dixon’s focus, including taking him to Chicago’s International Home & Gifts Tradeshow in March. He still has one hand full of his consulting work; the other, is on Kebo.

Because you only need one.

Beer not included.

Get your Kebo online, $24.95
Get your Kebo locally at Bottles, The Coastal Cupboard or Charleston Cooks! 

Story by: Jessica Kenny