Lime Design: Makers of the Barmaid

Massachusetts native, Holli Bessant, came up with the idea for the Barmaid Drink Rimmer while entertaining friends. The old method of using a dish to salt and re-salt margaritas was consistently messy and wasteful. After a night of entertaining, Holli and her husband Tim McCaffery always threw out a lot of salt/sugar, and their kitchen counter and floor were strewn with salt.

Holli envisioned a system that could handle multiple types of cocktails, for example, lemon drop martinis with sugar and margaritas with salt, and would also be able to replenish the salt or sugar on the rim if it ran out half-way through the drink. Tim, in business school at MIT, was in the midst of a product design and development class. Together with classmates from MIT, Tim turned Holli's idea into reality in the MIT Hobby Shop. The team worked on patents, market research, manufacturing possibilities, funding options, and many prototypes. It turns out that affixing a solid to the rim of a glass in an upright position is no easy feat. Though The Barmaid may look like a simple device, there is a significant amount of engineering that has gone into it.

After leaving school, Tim founded Lime Design to bring the product to the market. The company is now located in Boston, Massachusetts, where all their products are designed and assembled.