> I want something that does not exist, I will make it.
Making things has never been so accessible, if you don't know how to start, join a community and ask, if they are hostile, just ask chatgpt and start from there.
3d printers are 200$, esp32 is the same cost as arduino nano.
Want to make AI things? Make them. Want to make coat hangers? Make them. Want to make a book stand? Make it.
I have few bank PCBs, and every day I hold one and I ask it 'what do you want to be?' and just wait and listen, it doesn't tell me, so I make it into what I want, and then try again the next day.
As David Lynch says, ideas are very quiet, you have to learn how to listen, so far I have not heard one, but maybe some day..
In 2020, I really wanted an eink calendar to hang on my wall.
Still, many people built one for themselves and never turned it into a commercial product.
It’s a lot of work and some of it is boring. And you have to pay for certification and worry about all that paperwork that comes with a business.
It took me 3 years:
I just placed an order for the coworking space I run in Brighton, UK.
Super excited about all the potential applications of this. The simplicity of the developer experience [1] is exactly what I want.
Seems like it will also work wonderfully with the screenshot api [2] I'm currently working at.
[1]: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...
[2]: https://urlbox.io
But, I soon realised that it wasn't cheap enough or reliable enough to be a product. That would require a lot more work and investment.
This is the thing that got me down and it seems to be the biggest barrier to entry for commercializing hardware products. The CE/FCC certification is killer.
Something to consider if you decide to market to businesses.
[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-find-your-icloud...
I guess the main advantage would be always-on with little to no power consumption, but all your pictures still have cables.
Also, such a slick KickStarter campaign typically costs $10k plus ad spend if you buy it from an agency. Roughly 25% of the final price will be marketing and ads. I know because I've seen first hand that you need a 3400% mark-up on the production costs to profitably sell bikinis in the US.
These hangers will also likely cost <$0.1 to make at scale. It's the initial investments into CNCed molds and the upfront marketing that determine the price.
But marketing is extremely important and it’s just a very different skill than tech.
I make these epaper calendar displays.
https://shop.invisible-computers.com
I have invested thousands of hours into making them as good as possible. You couldn’t tell from my website :D
I would probably profit much more if I just stopped improving them and focused on marketing. But I just feel much more drawn to improving the product.
Um, did you see how many prototypes she went through? And also, 3 years - it's in the title.
Designing products that kinda-sorta work might be easy and affordable.
Designing products that work well and don't have annoying edge cases is still hard.
Unless you think that Simone Giertz is unusually bad at this sort of thing?
What’s the best way to learn marketing skills? Books, courses? I feel like there’s a lot of trash to sort through here.
I have a product I’ve been working on that is nearly ready, but I’ve told only a few people. Would it be better to learn by getting someone who is great at marketing involved, and learn from them?
For example, if you find a way to make some product two times cheaper (like Uber), you won't need much marketing.
Recently built a custom LED controller based on a WT32 ETH01 (cheap, $8 on Aliexpress, ESP32 with an Ethernet port). I ended up building 3 revision, all in EasyEDA (Web-based EDA tool), which integrates directly into JLPCB (PCB manufacturer).
After submitting to JLPCB, they fabbed the PCBs, assembled them, and shipped them to West Coast USA in less than a week! For like an all-in cost of ~$10 per board, insane.
The esp-idf toolchain is amazing, and pretty well documented, with lots of concrete examples of getting peripherals up and running (SPI, Ethernet, TCP/IP stack).
Then I need custom enclosures, so got a Bambu Labs X1. Learning Fusion 360 was a bit of a lift, but a week later had a snap-fit, fully custom enclosure.
That combo of super easy, supplier integrated EDA, cheap and quick fab and assembly, good tools chains, and easy building of enclosures is night-and-day from doing hobby electronics back in early 2000s.
Choose a base ESP32 board, design and have a shield fabbed in a week, quickly code it up, done.
If all you have is a hammer...
I have an opposing view. The current popularity of those particular crafting items has resulted in a plethora of crumbling and misshapen plastic widgets with barely-functional networking features that required limited creativity or novel ideas to create. This is to the detriment of the many other skills and crafts used to create physical objects.
I cannot fathom somebody still using an arduino nano.
but now that you said that I went and bought 10 esp32-s2s from aliexpress, thanks!
I am planning to do 'advent of things' this year, where I will make something small every day until Christmas, hopefully the s2 minis will arrive before december :)
Or, you could just, you know, buy them.
My beef with people who say, like you do that 3D printers are cheap or you can buy an arduino/pi/whatever, is simple.
People consistently fail to value their time, and the startup cost.
The startup cost because your thinking works on the assumption that people know how to use, e.g. a 3D printer out of the box. The reality is that most people don't. And as such, they will expend a great deal of time with Mr Google and various internet forums trying to figure it out. They will then proceed to flush money down the pan on materials during their learning.
Second people seem to value their time at zero. If you value your time at zero, then sure, its cheaper to make it yourself. But if you value your time realistically, its cheaper to either (a) buy it or (b) pay a domain-expert to make it for you.
For many people, most of it is spent doing such BS, doom-scrolling, binge-watching, games, and so on, that taking time making DIY stuff would be quite an improvement with regards to value their time, outcome, and even their mental health.
I once needed to make a few customized gears out of food safe plastic. I asked several online services for quotes and I called several on-location shops in northern Germany. The quotes I got were all around $1800 per unique gear shape. Since I needed 4 different shapes (i.e. $7k for outsourcing), it was much cheaper to buy a 3D printer, watch some tutorials and spend two working days just to make them myself.
Plus I honestly don't know why Shapeways (for example) will always quote you multiple weeks in lead time. What do they do in those 2 weeks after the print finished but before they send the parcel?
It's just that many people can afford to have hobbies, and hobbies do not have to earn money or be a good investment in order to be worth doing.
If that's your experience, either you're lucky, or just wait, or both. They're loud, and they keep coming faster and faster, and ideas beget ideas. You need a solid mental wall to protect yourself from them.
Edit: *you're
This solves a problem not everyone has (not me, for instance--I have full-size closets), but I almost wish I did. I think it's going to do well. The Kickstarter is already double-funded.
[1]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simonegiertz/coat-hinge...
A lot of her funding on KS is porbably based on that alone.
It is a cool design, but 3 years? She definitely worked on other projects in that time.
Ultimately the volume taken up by the clothes is the same, you either have a shallow but wide closet, or deep but narrow. If you are not worried about the crease this might cause down the middle, then you might as well fold the garment and put it on a shelf?
Also, where are trousers supposed to go now?
She also had multiple treatments for brain cancer. Though I think that was before this project I imagine such a thing takes a considerable toll.
I bet many people will buy it because of who made it, even if they don't need it.
She's a nice lady, but 9 months to incubate? Her mother definitely did other things in that time.
Her invention looks very niche to me, but what do I know anyway? Still remember when GTA 3 came out and I was like "Pfft, who'd want the back of the main character occupying a sizeable part of the screen all the time?!" :)
In the Kickstarter video she shows how you can hang pants with it: You split the coat hanger in half (where the 2 'triangles' are connecting by a plastic piece), and then just put the pants on half of the coat hanger. I guess it is the same as just folding the coat hanger and only using one half, but it looks tidier this way.
You can only mention the period of time something was developed if NOTHING else occurs at the same time? You can't multitask? Eat? Sleep? Use the restroom?
It took 3 years from the first thought to the start of the marketing campaign. So what?
She's moderately successful and a neat person, don't inject negativity into what is becoming less and less common on the internet, and what used to make it great.
My though was that, for being known for shitty robots, Simone came up with something that really wasn't shitty at all.
There is a claim this won't happen.
If you didn't recognize the name, you are in for a treat… She filmed a lot of those and her collaboration with other makers — her videos with Laura Kampf are a breath of fresh air.
It’s theft all the way down
First time I'm illustrating a comment with stock footage: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/studio-shot-of-hand...
Not the same thing! Sure! But close. And almost free.
No doubt that’s helping a lot.
Anyone who watched the first Indiana Jones film knows how sinister and awesome folding hangers are.
The use case is to be so prepared in life you have one in your leather trench coat to hang it up like a civilized person.
It’s just public posted sales revenue for a product that didn’t need a kickstart.
But I understand, in comparison to kickstarters that don’t succeed at all, yes.
More than triple-funded just 5 hours after your comment.
But my first thought was that it will almost certainly be cloned and sold en masse pretty quickly, so I hope she gets enough revenue from it to pay for her time.
I find that this is tends to be the rule, not the exception and it's really reworked how I view things. I've started to almost (more jokingly than seriously) believe that the less novel something appears the more it actually is. The real mark for a good work seems to be "wow, how did you spend so much time on that? It's so fucking obvious" combined with "why has no one else done this?" But it is also easy to post hoc attribute something to being "well that's just x and y, so not really novel." But far too many things can be trivialized that way.
I wanted to say this because I think especially in engineering circles we have this wild novelty paradox. Where we can understand how our work, despite all outward appearances, is exceptionally nuanced and has minor details that are critical but when we judge others' works we don't consider such details. I think this is because most details are baked in when you learn of the new thing. But we got a good litmus test: is anyone else making/producing/doing this "super simple blatantly obvious" thing. If no? It's probably deceptively complex. (It's also why you should laugh at anyone who starts a sentence with "It's so simple, you just...")
My favorite anecdote due to its simplicity and ubiquity that I never thought about previously was the anecdote about the idea of making top surfaces slanted in public spaces to keep people from placing empty drinking cups and such on top of them. So damn simple and inconspicuous, but so effective and now I see it everywhere!
The reason why this isn't a thing yet is a few reasons - from my humble perspective:
First, it's actually a 2 part system.
You need the coat hanger but you also need the coat rack, more specifically - the dowel, to be really close to the wall.
So you would want to sell this as a kit. She doesn't really talk about it in the video - it feels like an odd afterthought. The kickstarter has it but only at the $135 starting level.
Secondly, it's not a "one size fits all solution". I can't use this with really bulky jackets. I think it's a cool, front door, guest entryway piece.
Last, it's pricy - really pricy. You're asking me to pay ~$15-20/hanger. If you have this specific problem... still hard pressed - definitely expendable income level. But because it takes up more width, it can hold fewer items not a general place to store clothes (hence i think guest front door would be a cool-piece/talking-point).
Curtain rods are a solved problem with widespread availability across the quality spectrum, this is a total non-issue.
A fitted wardrobe would be pricey (~$4000), barely fit depthwise and half of the space would just be covering the flue if we wanted it wall to wall.
On the other hand I can just buy 3/4 of these for each wall and still come out ahead. The grooves in the rods are well thought out and mean that I can saw them to size myself, as can anyone.
The only drawback I can think of is having clothes up directly against a wall. This could obstruct airflow and be an incentive for mould to grow.
Might be time for my first ever pledge.
Btw, there is an alternative solution, a hanger where the hook can spin, so one can hang clothes diagonally, nearly flat. Hers looks nicer on the wall though.
Wouldn’t it be worth taking out a design patent on a product like this? It might not stop people making similar designs, but it would give you protection against outright clones.
The sheer quantity of goods being shipped in, one-by-one on a daily basis make it impossible to block in any effective manner.
Her example rack only contains the clothes that would be perfect for this. My rack and hangers accommodate all my needs with one simple cheap design.
I feel like it should come with some clips on the bottom for attaching items like trousers and other odd-shaped garments.
Some examples here, most of which should work with her hanger size:
There's very little room left on the hangar when I do that. Just like in that site's method.
So given a regular hanger will have ~10% of the hanger left empty with pants on it, and the new hanger cuts the continuous length down by 40%, I don't see how it'll be wide enough. Maybe her small person pants fit, but it doesn't seem like mine would.
> Giertz has previously branded herself as "the queen of shitty robots" on her YouTube channel, where she employs deadpan humor to demonstrate mechanical robots of her own creation to automate everyday tasks; despite working from a purely mechanical standpoint, they often fall short of practical usefulness, for comic effect.[9] Giertz's creations have included an alarm clock that slaps the user,
I think the highlights of her maker-career is Truckla, her Tesla she repurposed as a truck and drove to the cyber truck reveal. And her everyday calendar, which is a board of 365 LED and you can click each for everyday you complete whatever your everyday goal is and end the year with a lot board. As I recall it met and exceeded its kickstarter.
https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/simone-giertz-inventor...
(voice of machine by Adam Savage)
[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simonegiertz/coat-hinge...
Small run hardware manufacturing is extremely expensive. It's not until you are doing volumes in the millions, the factory has invested in custom tooling, and you're buying material by the truckload straight from the manufacturer that prices really start to collapse.
Right now she is probably getting the steel off the shelf, the plastic pieces from a small shop, the forming from another small shop, and the construction done by hand. All expensive relatively speaking.
She mentions in the video that the plastic pieces are injection moulded over the wire, that's a clear indication that it isn't all done by hand. This is very likely being manufactured in a factory in China, with a 1000-2000% markup. But it's got a great story attached to it, and that's what sells it.
My guess however is that within a few months if this goes semi-viral is there will be $1 versions from ali-express after they get a little time to play around. Obviously they won't be manufactured as well, but they likely will be good enough to fool some people into buying them and working for a few months before they wear out
2. You can buy 1 for $20 sure. But they are also selling 12 for $75. $6.25 each is not nearly so bad for a small batch product. Larger production runs could likely be much cheaper.
3. Are Nvidia’s margins really that great? $4.2B profit on $27B revenue works out to less than 16%. Many people who criticize per-unit sales by tech companies totally neglect R&D costs that need to be recouped somehow.
Not sure how much it costs, but it doesn't look difficult to make. There might be patents though.
That takes up more wall space, and makes it harder to see what everything is.
I get that this is not the product for you (or me either), but don't compare the 3 years of on again, off again mulling over the design with your 20 seconds of thought on the problem space.
It's a solved problem, is what I imagine OP meant by the "idea". It's not theirs. Those products exist.
It's not harder to see what everything is because they come in variants where they are stacked vertically, can pop out, can slide out. I agree it might not be as space efficient, but at least you are not limited to thin items that don't crease. And it's just a rack and you can use $0.50 coat hangers instead of $6 ones.
I do see the beauty of this design, and it can be useful when you have limited width as well (as the van pictured), so this is not a hate on that, just that this is not a revolution, just a different take on it.
For places where space is at a premium a normal coat hanger on a telescopic rod would be a viable alternative in many cases, i.e. have the clothes rotate almost 90°, and mostly overlap.
You can also stack the coat hangers vertically, e.g. with cheap plastic brackets like these: https://a.aliexpress.com/_Ew6YWEt
There's surely good niche use cases for these, but looking at this advertisment I don't see why I'd want to go for this particular solution.
The sales pitch would be more convincing if it was contrasted to other space saving clothes hanging techniques in existing use, rather than pointing out that the inventor was unable to find prior art for her particular solution.
A sharp/small radius fold will leave a crease but will be significantly less noticeable on most clothes than wrinkles.
And either way the crease would be along a stress point where wearing the clothes would smooth the crease out quickly.
But in the discarded invention pile we can see an older design that folds down the exact middle (it has springs on the bottom).
Or (in the case of that cheap AliExpress plastic dongle) pull the bottom part up and away from the wall, and detach the clothes item with your other hand.
And yeah, maybe it's less pretty or whatever, but that's my point unthread: since this isn't contrasted with existing viable alternatives the sales pitch is rather incoherent.
https://www.amazon.ca/Retractable-Adjustable-Wardrobe-Clothi...
Mount under shelf. Use high quality hanger that doesn't damage or crease. No extra folding action. Put nice article of clothing in front and looks very nice.
Turning storage 90 degrees for shallow storage solves more problems than folding clothes in half. Having seen tons of these in show rooms, I dare say it's a long solved problem. Also there's rods with angled notches to turn hangers 45 degrees.
The way it's presented in the video it does look really nice, but having to pair it with one of their rods is kind of limiting.
If she's going ditch purity of wood or steel wire, with bits of plastic, go all the way and have nice little molded end for shoulders. Or coat the wire in velvet which is life changing upgrade in terms of anti slip (she has muh silicon stoppers). Also would be nice if she extended horizontal neck of hanger out with a stop to keep fabric away from the back/wall so the crease is not rubbing against a surface. Just little ideas which I feel like she must have considered with 100+ iterations and the result is functionally subpar. Granted aestehtically simply and pleasing to some.
Only in the comments does she post "If you have any technical questions, my co-inventor @stumcconnel will be here helping answer stuff!"
So not only did she not invent this by herself, she's referring to someone else for technical questions. This isn't the first time she's done this. It's just a pet peeve as someone who is technical and has gotten credit assigned to someone else. /soapbox
She mentions two people by name in the video
How is this different from any tech CEO going on stage saying "We created this amazing thing"? It's not like they personally developed this.
It's not like the people doing presentations for Apple, Google or Samsung 100% made the stuff themselves either.
As a single data point someone linked one of her previous video (from 2years ago) on her bed and funnily enough in it you can see some coat hingers prototype : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inVvXS6gA8c&t=984s
Simone literally put the design on a platter for Tesla and they managed to not only screw it up, they still haven't made it four years later.
edit: I've been told they're the same platform
The simplest thing would be to just get a hanger with a rotating hook and hang it at a ~45 degree angle and I don't see how her solution is better, especially considering she wants to have over $6 per hanger.
I have no idea if this is true or not but that is the problem statement.
Nevertheless, fair question.
This is exactly how Apple got so rich. They "invent" and design hardware/software using a minimal amount of privileged well paid peoples and then go on and exploit cheap labor in a faraway country in order to sell the device with insane markup in their own county, very often to peoples who could have very much used a well-paid labor job.
China is making very clear an obvious fact: ideas, designs, concepts, and immaterial things like that only have value when they can be shared and executed upon. Making is where most of the valuable creation happens. Apple would be making zero dollar is it was only an idea of a device and not the actual very well-built device, enabled by China's workers...
China is the apex of the open source philosophy taken to the maximum extent.
In stacking case, it is "expensive" to Read, I mean choose and pick and put the stack back so it aligns nicely.
Plus folding the shirt in the first place takes more effort.
But after watching through to the end, Giertz comes off really genuine and it's an inspiring short story of failure and problem solving, and I love that. I believed at the end that she's solving a unique problem. Can't hate on it.
Nice quote, have to remember.
But if space (depth) is the issue then there are many existing solutions like a "multi layer" hanger.
I just googled "multi layer hanger".
May be this has a use case or it simply scratches the creator's itch.
Now I wish they had a hinge too. (Hmm, weekend project?)
She's a successful inventor & youtuber, good on her. the product is not bad actually, a great impulse buy (gifting), just not for me.
Upload a photo of this proposed system in action. Prove it doesn't look like a mess. See if the wastage at start and end of rack is problematic. Then upload a video of putting a random clothing item in and also removing one.
There is a reason people don't do this, try it and see.
The fold as done here, without any external force, won't result in a crease
Why doesn't it fold in the opposite direction, so that the fold faces out rather than in? Seems to me that orientation would be better for organization and finding what you're looking for at a glance in the closet.
If the hook part could be rotated (as is in common design of other hangers), such orientation could be easily accomplished. As the hook is fixed, it cannot be.
If you think I'm being crass, I got this perspective from here. A rural Chinese student went to the big City. One classmate gave a pitch about a startup for family name / style napkins to sell. He couldn't help himself but show how most of the people in the country used napkins.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and they were offended.
Congratulations on your accomplishment, and as a creative person who constantly feels the wrath of rejection due to people not seeing the inherent utility of music as a pathway to happiness...this will go on my wall next to the toilet that encourages kids to poop in it by talking to them.
I wonder, if creasing is still an issue, if it'll be clearly asymmetrical especially on the back... Since the fold in the hanger isn't centered.
It doesn't solve a problem I have, and I worry that they might break under heavier clothes, but it's a cool and surprisingly simple idea, and probably perfect for people with tiny houses. Which is probably a growing demographic.
I saw a similar thing some time ago posted here about designing better pockets for pants. Finally found it again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301280
On this design though, my biggest criticism would be that it requires the hanger to be leaning against the wall when folded, to not fall at an angle. While that's fine for the co-designed rack she has, it makes them a lot less useful on their own or in other randomly wall-to-rack spaced closets (even says so in the kickstarter).
The simple solution is to move the hook to be centered over the folded hanger, so it's balanced when folded. It'd look super goofy and not hang right unfolded, but that's probably fine. Surprised none of the prototypes tried that.
Seems obvious if you’ve had to wear a perfect military uniform you pressed.
Three years and no one mentioned this, is this real content or is this fake TV?
My second point: Meh. I might find it interesting if I found it while browsing in a dollar store but it's not exactly intriguing stuff.
I do not know how will she prevent people from copying it?
Amazon is terrible, if something works, many will copy it for half the price. And it's not fare.
And demoed with hanging a t-shirt, just fold it.
All but the cheapest (single piece moulded plastic) coat hangers have hooks that swivel, so it could hang at an angle solving this anyway. There are also products on the market that collapse down vertically, so you have multiple items on one hook, which as long as it also swivels solves this problem too and gives much more capacity. The folding design puts creases in, and takes twice as much space horizontally - if you have the outward space problem you're probably short of that too.
But it's a nice video of designing and prototyping and creating something, I might subscribe/watch some more of her stuff even though I think this particular solution (and especially as a kickstarted product) is silly.
Off to kickstarter I go.
"There's a sucker born every minute!" - Old saying
https://medium.com/skeptikai/the-real-story-behind-the-quote...
