Gadget guy: His colorful, quirky gizmos get folks cooking with sass

They were standing in City Kitchens, two foodies of a certain age, each holding a pair of tongs.

"Oh, you're going to love those," David Holcomb tells them, spotting his Chef'n Tongo tongs in their hands.

And because the ebullient Holcomb never misses a chance to promote his line of Chef'n kitchen gadgets, he continues, pointing to a photo on the product packaging. "I'm that guy!" he says.

"Noooo!" says one of the ladies, giving Holcomb a look over. "This is you? Will you autograph this?"

And so it went the other day for Holcomb, Chef'n founder and CEO, although the description underneath his photo on the Tongo reads "famous inventor." Other Chef'n products bestow even more descriptors: "inventive maverick," reads a one-handed pepper grinder named the PepperBall; "Papayaneer," professes the Pliapaya, the tropical fruit de-seeder; "Crabby," declares the crab-shelling tool called the WiseCracker.

Chef'n products, which come in a variety of colors — including cherry, huckleberry and grape — also include the Switchit, a dual-ended spatula; a circular trivet called a DiscGo; and the appropriately named Flexicado, for slicing avocados. Could a mango-gogo be far behind?

Chef'n products are as whimsical as Holcomb for a reason.

"Because at the end of the day, what you really need is a good cutting block, a frying pan and a knife," says the avid cook. "The rest of it is just a lot of fun."

But cooking gadgets are also serious business, as anyone who's cruised the aisles of kitchen stores can attest. Cookware and cutlery might be the bread-and-butter of the $62 billion U.S. industry, but kitchen tools and gadgets aren't necessarily burnt toast. The market for such tools and gadgets totaled $1.2 billion in 2002, according to Riedel Marketing Group, which tracks the housewares industry. And it's remained steady ever since.

"If you're a cook at all, you probably buy something in this area at least once, a couple of times a year," says A.J. Riedel, senior partner for the Phoenix-based marketing group. "You may not buy a red toaster because you worry you might get tired of it. But you'll buy a red spatula or a red pancake turner to bring some brightness into the kitchen without investing a lot of money."

Last year, households in the Greater Seattle metro area spent $1,150 on housewares and small appliances, according to Demographics Now. And according to another 2004 survey, 49 percent of Seattle-Tacoma metro area adults shopped at a home accessories store in the previous three months. At the time, that finding put Seattle as the number-one-ranking U.S. metropolitan area for such things.

"People are always looking for easier ways to do a task," says Renée Benke, owner of Sur La Table.

Indeed, wall space devoted to kitchen gadgets now teems with brightly colored silicone oven mitts, baking mats, brushes, spoons, spatulas and whisks. These days, it seems, black and white is staunchly reserved only for pepper and salt. .

In his downtown Seattle office overlooking Westlake Plaza (office walls painted avocado), Holcomb is showing off a Switchit, the dual-ended, asymmetric spatula designed to glide at any angle of a bowl, pot or pan.

In a review last year, The Washington Post wrote: "We're highly skeptical of many new-fangled gadgets. But we'd rather not go back to life as we knew it before Switchits."

The Switchit, which like other Chef'n items is sold in retail stores in the U.S. as well as overseas, recently garnered a top international design award known as "the red dot." Then, in June, the Chef'n WiseCracker won the "Best of Category" design award from I.D. magazine. The gizmo, which slips inside a crab leg and splits it, graces the cover of this month's magazine.

The decidedly jovial Holcomb, with his flyaway hair and sassy personality, couldn't be happier. Chef'n is 20 years old, but Holcomb has only been solely at its helm for the past two years, after buying out his previous business partner.

"The first year was a real struggle. We worked our butts off, and we went full-heartedly into product development," he says. Annual sales this year are expected to be somewhere between $15 million and $20 million — a 300 percent increase from the previous year, according to the CEO.

Holcomb, who grew up on Queen Anne, was the oldest of seven kids. Cooking was a given. He scrambled his first eggs at the age of 5. And when he was 6, he birthed his first product: a letter opener carved from a stick.

Holcomb's father made fiberglass decorative panels for a living, and Holcomb learned the trade as a teen. When he was a college student at Central Washington University, a friend came to him with a broken skateboard. Holcomb built a new one, which led to his first business venture: Hoke Skateboards, which Holcomb eventually sold for a very nice sum.

Holcomb moved to Hawaii and lived well before he spent all his money and wound up broke on the beach. He washed dishes then, eventually, worked as a cook, winding up as a chef (sous, grill and sauté) in four professional kitchens in Hawaii and later, back in Seattle.

"Cooking was instant gratification" in terms of creativity, he says. "But I knew I had to get back into manufacturing, into making unique things."

It was while standing in a kitchen store at the foot of Queen Anne Hill where Holcomb remembers spotting a tube of garlic paste. "And I came up with the idea of something that had the ease of a tube but without the fuss of having to clean up a mess after each [garlic] clove."

The Garlic Machine — insert any amount of peeled garlic into tube; screw down to what's needed; then store the rest, tube and all, in the fridge — hit the market in 1982. "Patent number 4,537,123," its maker recites.

Now, all he needed was a company name.

Just before a meeting one afternoon, Holcomb remembers hearing the Grateful Dead playing on his stereo.

Truckin' got my chips cashed in/Keep truckin ...

Chef'n, with its "tasteful ingenuity" motto, debuted in 1982.

The company now has 79 products, one of its most popular being the wildly adorable PepperBall, which a lot of people swear looks like a bunny, although Holcomb insists that's just by coincidence.

The WiseCracker isn't as whimsical looking, but it's got a cute story behind it. Not too long ago, a bunch of people were out on Holcomb's boat, its deck heavy with a mound of fresh crab. At dinnertime, folks started whacking the cooked crabs with hammers. Crab juice was flying. Spencer Clyde Holcomb, then age 8, sassed his father: Hey. Big inventor. Why don't you come up with something?

The next day, Holcomb sketched something and, little by little, his design team morphed the idea into a product that sells for about $15. No word yet whether Spencer Clyde or his sister Ariel have inspired anything else.

Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com.

Seattle Times staff researcher Gene Balk contributed to this story.