I think the best ideas come when you make something that you really want for yourself.
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:
For that price I can purchase 3 Google home smart displays which do all this and more.
I guess the main advantage would be always-on with little to no power consumption, but all your pictures still have cables.
For me (i built something similar) the main advantages where:
- I control my own data - It is e-ink, not glaring into my face - Screen is way bigger - Screen is hanging on the wall, I do not have to look down - Less energy consumption of course
and most importantly:
- Google home displays are not actually helpful at all in this respect (we have one in the kitchen too) as they do not show calendar info well at all. For a family of 4 you need to be able to look at the entire week or more to plan events quickly
PS: I use a 10000mAh battery in the frame, so no cables A typical use-case is glancing at the calendar during a phone call for example
Control your own data is certainly a big selling point, but seems this one seems to rely on a closed source saas model.
I agree with everything you're saying, but I do want to note that you can put just about anything you want on Google's displays by casting.
HomeAssistant has built-in support to cast lovelace dashboards onto them, and it works surprisingly well. Even has touchscreen support, which I didn't know was possible with casting.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/cast/#home-assist...
You're comparing the output of a small business with a multinational behemoth that has the advantages in procurement and manufacturing due to volume. What's the point of making that comparison and effectively negging someone's work?
People buy products based on the value proposition of those products, not because they are hippies that want to support independent technology makers.
I don't understand why factual statement and reality checks get modded down; this is just plain denial.
What an odd reply. Where possible, I will try and support independent technology makers, often even if that means it's a slightly worse/different product.
Just because you're cynical and jaded, doesn't mean that everyone else is. You're not giving a factual reality check, you're just being an ass
But those 3 google home smart displays are ugly, use watts of power and are spying on you.
And you have to pay for certification
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.
CE is much worse than FCC. Maybe the US Market would work as a start?
I can recommend Sunfire Testing for certification. They are used to working with hackers.
If you want you can email me and I can maybe help with you with some advice.
We just had a great experience working with US TECH (https://ustech-lab.com).
The price was reasonable (for what it is), the main contact was great, they were very fast and super flexible with our delays.
I know they offer CE, but we just went for FCC on unintentional emitters. It wasn't nearly as challenging as we thought it would be.
Expect to pay something around $2,500 to $5,000 depending on how labor intensive your tests are, or become.
Expect to pay something around $2,500 to $5,000
Yeah, that's what's discouraging. For something that is effectively a hobby project, spending many thousands of dollars is too much of a risk, when you're not even sure people will buy the thing you created.
thats a great reference, thanks!
Sadly I am in the UK. I guess I could certify it with the FCC anyway, but my aim was to sell locally initially.
Would you mind elaborating on what felt problematic, please? I looked into the CE requirements a few years ago and it didn't seem like a large barrier for small electronic devices - nothing that wouldn't be expected in a safe design already, such as ensuring proper earthing or using lead-free components.
I'm curious to know what you found so that I don't have any unpleasant surprises should I go ahead with a hardware product! Maybe konschubert also has experiences they could share here.
The issue is that verification costs 10K, no matter if you use a pre-certified radio or not.
I am so happy to have discovered this here. I've wanted this product for 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
Holy crap, now I am impressed!
If I am seeing this right, I could use your screenshot API to implement a website rendering feature for the display, super easily!
I was toying with running headless chromium, but if I can get that as a service, it's an absolute winner! But I would need to see if I can afford the pricing.
Providing this service to my users for an average device lifetime of 10 years free of charge is a lot of screenshots... I won't be able to fold that into the price of the smart screen. I might need to look into a subscription.
Thank you!
I have a few ideas about some tweaks we could make to support you and your customers with this.
We're up to 11 years and profitable with a small full-time team... so I'm very confident that we'll still be around in another 10 :)
I'll drop you an email to discuss.
Urlbox has a beautiful website. And the invisible calendar is beautiful too. Would it happen to render multiple calendars concurrently? (I share an office, seems like the perfect xmas gift)
Thank you!
Credit to Lukas Wiesehan: https://lw.works/en
Nice design work on Urlbox
Cheers. That was thanks to Lukas: https://lw.works/en
This looks nice. The website is a bit thin on description/documentation. How much does the display weigh? What's the power usage (Watts)? Presumably the device connects via Wifi? Does it support WPA3? Does this work with private iCloud calenders (e.g. as described in [0])? Is all processing on-device, i.e. doesn't involve any cloud services and would work in a closed home network if the calendars are served on that network? What's the update frequency/interval? Can it combine multiple calendars (i.e. private and work)? Is the frame user-replacable?
[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-find-your-icloud...
Hi, you are right, I need to add a FAQ section to the page!
- It weights about 400g including the wooden stand.
- It draws very little power. I am not sure how much, but you can run it on a battery pack for quite a while. (The power draw is so low that some external battery packs think that nothing is connected and go into standby, which is annoying.)
- Yes it uses WiFI. Not sure about WPA3 to be honest.
- Private iCloud calendars should work if you get the secret iCalendar URL as described in the article you linked.
- There is very little processing on-device, it needs an API backend that runs on the internet. Code that runs on an embedded device and updates only via Over-The-Air updates is always a liability in terms of maintenance and security, which I tried to minimise.
- The device polls for updates a few times a minute. But depending on the calendar integration, there may be caching going on in the backend. (For example, iCalendar data is cached for 10 minutes. The cache is encrypted.)
- Yes, you can combine calendars from multiple sources and accounts.
- You can replace the frame if you are willing to tinker a bit, re-solder a connection, and are you're careful.
Thanks. Would you open-source the server software so one can self-host it? To be honest, I wouldn’t want to disclose my calendars to a third party.
I’m a worried about my IP being stolen, to be honest. I don’t have much of a moat besides the software which is quite solid, I think
You should 'Show HN' this in its own right, this is great.
It has been on here a couple of times: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=invisible-computers.c...
Yeah I saw those just checking if it had been via Algolia, but they didn't do very well and I thought an actual 'Show HN' that's clearly a 'member project' as it were, with someone around to answer questions and chat about it, might fare better. (The call for feedback a couple of years ago aside.) Plenty of interest in this thread despite no relation (in terms of the product) to OP! And people seem often to be commenting about these things, or difficulty in buying big/good enough epaper displays to do it, etc.
I’ve done this before and I’m afraid I’ll get banned if I do this too much.
Even though I definitely am a normal, annoying HN user. :)
That's a pretty great price for an eink based display. Only setup thru iPhone atm? When is Android coming? Is there a webui for setup as an alternative?
iCalendar setup is only possibly through the iPhone app at the moment.
From what I gather, only iCalendar can be setup just through iPhone.
It can display calendars from Google Calendar and any iCalendar link* (ical, ics, ...).
You need your phone (iOS or Android) only for the initial configuration.
You can setup Google Calendar through Android
Almost everything is possible with Android.
The icalendar support is very new and The Android update for it is still in progress.
link is broken for me
Fixed
I've wanted something like this for a while... might have to pick one up. Congrats on making something you wanted AND bringing it to market.
I'd pay more for a version with touchscreen support for reserving a block of time. I've been using Joan's for several years and people generally love them, but their subscription price-to-feature value leaves much to be desired.
Something to consider if you decide to market to businesses.
Every great product needs a product expert and a technical expert. The two overlapping is a magical opportunity to create something not only new, but right.
Funny . i built something quite similar and many others I am sure too. World is pretty good today. BTW your price is very good, the screen and battery itself is quite expensive already for me (two color e-paper)
I made a picture frame that I can send photos to with Telegram. I've been using it for years and have made a couple for family members too.
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.
Ha, awesome! I half built one but never finished. Good for you.
That's great, I really wanted something like that when I worked at Google because nobody allowed their machine to make noise and I'd miss the 'meeting indicator' and be late for meetings. Started making one but with much more grandiose and expensive design :-). So impressed you got this done and on the market!
That’s class! Well done.
Want to make AI things? Make them. Want to make coat hangers? Make them. Want to make a book stand? Make it.
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.
Sadly, 3D printers are still cheaper.
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?
Would you consider the parts you made foodsafe? Or would you have to use the parts to make a mold, then produce foodsafe parts? The nooks and crannies in 3d printed plastic, plus the less controlled melting/cooling has concerned me for making something which is food safe. Mostly the concern about places for bacteria to hide on the parts.
It also depends on what you are doing. If they are single-use, they can be made food-safe pretty easily, even with the nooks and crannies. With 3d printing, it can be pretty cheap to do single-use stuff. You can also electro-plate them with silver and have a pretty sanitary part.
You can also electro-plate them
You can electro-plate thermoplastic?
Yes. It generally involves applying a mildly conductive layer first, for which there are a variety of techniques.
No, the stuff that directly comes out of the 3D printer is not foodsafe. Some of it is biocompatible, though, which means you can safely lick it for a while. But you can use 3D printing to create foodsafe molds and then use them to cast foodsafe plastic copies of your 3D-printed master.
Probably the only way to make it reliably foodsafe without a lot of postprocessing would be replacing the parts frequently. It's possible to perfectly merge the layers by printing with 100% infill, burying the part in fine grained salt and then remelting it in an oven, but that takes time.
I have multiple small plastic components that have broken for my appliances and use some quick fixes to get the appliance working again, but they eventually break again. These cheap pieces of plastic can never be purchased alone and require buying a much more expensive part which includes the cheaper plastic piece.
Saying that, 3D printing really seems like something I'd like to start doing and build my own parts to fix things myself. Any recommendations on a printer to use?
I wouldn't call it a recommendation, but I suffer through using my Formlabs SLA printer because the results are of amazing quality. But their resin is expensive, you need 2 additional machines if you want to do the washing and curing halfway conveniently and since the beginning (and still ongoing) there have been firmware issues which cause the machine to sometimes lock you out of a DRM-ed resin cartridge before it is actually empty ... but in exchange you get a pretty reliable 0.1mm precision on stable waterproof parts that look like they were injection molded. With the right settings, nobody will recognize the parts as 3D printed because there are no visible layer lines at all and after a bit of varnish you can get the clear resin to be see-through like acrylic glass.
you probably get scheduled in the down time between actually important clients.
Plus I honestly don't know why Shapeways (for example) will always quote you multiple weeks in lead time
Because they can get you to pay more to skip the wait, probably.
People consistently fail to value their time, and the startup cost.
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.
exactly - I would call this the "forgetting the entertainment value" fallacy :)
Also you can't turn your time into money as fungible as spending money is. So Tme is more "liquid" than cash.
That said I got a 3d printer in mid-2016 and basically printed daily getting to know it until the start of 2019 - I had sooo much fan turning the wooden printer i started out with into something reliable. Nowadays i mainly print stuff as I design and need it a couple times a month.
Time is not money. When you spend money - you lose money. When you don't spend time - you lose time!
If you sell your time for a living, then time (during certain parts of the day), does have a value. If you aren't selling your time and are doing something else, you are losing money.
For the vast majority of people who sell their time for a living, their time doesn't actually have value because they are either on salary, and cannot exchange more time for more money, or their manager controls their schedule and they do not get to choose how much time they get to sell for how much money.
Eh, at some point you end up with a backlog of things to do where you never have unspent time.
I've got about 3-500 hours left on a home renovation project, 10-20 on a playhouse for my daughter, 50 or so on a desk for myself, 1000 on a personal programming project, I really need to spend about 500 hours getting back into shape, and all of that is competing for the time I have left after the weekly commitments I have to my day job, my family, and basic self-care.
Practically speaking I'm working with about 10-20 hours a week here of discretionary spending, maybe 30 or so if I'm really tight and can use all the disjoint minutes effectively, and will get through my current backlog in 2-3 years. If nothing else comes up that's higher priority.
With inflation when you don't spend money you lose money too.
But what's the fun in just buying stuff? Imagine every problem is solved with money, there is no taste to anything amymore.. if she could just buy a foldable hanger this video was much shorter, not fun, not interesting..
I don't value my time at zero, I just think making something is more valuable than my time.
I think you're missing the point, which is that for some people making things is immensely rewarding
You are correct about the utility calculation, of course.
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.
To me, this really shows that marketing is now the most crucial skill. It has become easy and affordable to design products, the process is now almost fully commodified with all those OEM and production services. The only thing that now stands between your idea and financial success is your ability to reach the target market, i.e. marketing.
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.
Making a product, certifying it and making sure it’s safe is also hard.
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.
That's great! Some small things about your website:
- "Contact" page says "Kontact" in en-GB locale
- Do you need a shopping cart for one product? Just have the "buy it now" and leave the cart out?
- Do you need a search? There are only a couple of pages.
- The Contact page might want to highlight to the user that there is a chat feature in the bottom right, if they prefer that to email.
Other than those little bits, the site looks pretty good to me! Payments seem slick. Have you done things like ProductHunt?
Oh, wow, thanks for the feedback!
No I haven't done ProductHunt.
I am not sure if I can disable the cart on shopify?
I think I need better pictures, and I need a better shopify theme.
I think the pictures are pretty good already, but yes, perhaps.
If you wanted to dive into more feature work, possibly the next thing is thinking about CEOs who might want a) Outlook integration, and b) a way to shade off their calendar for privacy somehow. Another thing could be to stick more with consumers and have a way to display recipes on it? Maybe if there's a recipe service you could partner with that has a decent API?
But in general I reckon you should market the Google Calendar stuff, which already exists and looks awesome!
A nice application for this might be places that have reservations that would be helpful if displayed. For example, tennis courts, squash courts, etc. People make the reservation online and, when they get to the facility, often don't remember which court they've reserved. Having it on a display would avoid having to look it up on the phone.
Those sorts of places also might have a budget for something like this.
I'm a software engineer, and the most concerned about marketing in my circle... and I still suck at it and promoting my stuff. How do I get better? I would love to work on actual marketing projects with experienced marketers as a side project.
Yes, your website has two user hostile features which immediately make me want to click away
1) Sending cookies to track me, and then a big lie about how you "value my privacy" while trying to track me and sell my data to your "partners"
" ► UpPromote Affiliate Marketing [Application] - Running..."
2) A cookie banner, which you completely ignore as you've already set 7 cookies before your javascript craps out ("TypeError: a.R is undefined"). At this point I haven't done a single thing on your page worthy of even a session cookie.
3) Once you "decline" your banner (which doesn't stop those cookies - including cookies you have set for 12 months in the future), you get a "chat" window with a red notification icon
I think your complaints are valid. For starters, I turned off that affiliate marketing thing, I wasn't using that anyways.
But marketing is extremely important and it’s just a very different skill than tech.
I once watched my father sell a single christmas lightbulb to another guy on a garage sale in the middle of july. "I convinced him he needed it" After that day I paid attention to sales. Some people just have that knack for it. They naturally know all the techniques and when to use them and how to properly use them. There used to be a very nice wikipedia article that broke most of them down but it looks like that page is gone (or I can not find it).
Seeing that you're German, too, I would suggest that you try to reach out to some newspapers. I know that's extremely old school, but it worked well for us. newsaktuell.de/ots is a service where you can send in a press release (and pay) and they'll distribute it to newspaper reporters for you. Also, they offer "Native Advertising" which is basically that you write an article about yourself and they'll pretend as if it was objective news written by them.
And lastly, did you know that you can contact your local IHK and they will report about you in their membership magazine? You probably already pay for the IHK and you probably already get their magazine. A calender seems like something that other CEOs would want to hear about, so this might actually be great content for their magazine. And just like you, every other company owner is also a mandatory IHK magazine subscriber ;)
Marketing is only important if your product is equal to existing or worse.
For example, if you find a way to make some product two times cheaper (like Uber), you won't need much marketing.
That is not true, at least not for all types of products.
I make an e-paper calendar. There is nothing like it on the market. Regularly, I have customers who say "wow, I have been looking for this for years!".
Some of these customers have googled for such a product before mine existed, and found that none exists.
Without marketing, how would these people learn that the product they've been looking for does now exist?
How do you expect to face competition from general-purpose, high-resolution E-Ink displays appearing on the market now? They are getting to the point where it would be within the ability of an average computer hobbyist to mount one on their wall along with one of the many 'HDMI stick' computers.
Your product looks very polished already, and is considerably cheaper than such general purpose displays right now. However, the E-Ink display market is (finally) becoming mainstream, which makes me wonder where you'll go from here.
No problem if your response would be too sensitive to share in public; good luck with your business in any case!
Uber's initial rates were way below a sustainable rate. Pure marketing combined with lots of media work to make them known.
Low prices don't help, if nobody knows the product exists.
To me, this really shows that marketing is now the most crucial skill. It has become easy and affordable to design products,
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?
The sweat equity of 3 years and dozens of prototypes only contributes to 5% of the product's success. Marketing will drive 95% of the return.
Damn, with that kind of math, it almost doesn't seem worth investing the time and effort to ensure that the product works well!
I hope people who think like that are happy with their buggy-as-shit computer games on release day. Because they deserve to be.
EA, Bethesda, Activision-Blizzard, etc all release broken shit and rake in millions and millions. I don't know what you think your point is. The vast majority of the market responds by whining on social media and then giving you 80$, plus whatever you ask for for literally new textures.
Just look at No man's Sky and Cyberpunk! They basically advertised games that didn't even exist, released something basically unrelated, and now the market rates their products highly positive and earnest people will tell you to give them more money!
America hasn't rewarded sincerity in a hundred years
This is something I’ve come to appreciate much more recently - how hard (or at least unnatural) marketing / sales is. A social media following (upon the right audience) is turning into a new metric for economic power, and it’s a skill in it of itself to self-promote tactfully.
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?
You will need to dive in, hit road blocks, fail and regroup to learn sales. Books/ courses can give you motivation, but you will learn most of the art through "the school of hard knocks."
Simone Giertz (the video's creator) is what you could call a professional DIYer. She has an 8 year old Youtube channel dedicated entirely to making weird or beautiful stuff. She happens to also be good at a specific flavor of marketing, but just because the maker part appears easy when she demonstrates it I wouldn't conclude that anyone with the right idea could have reached the same end result. There is a lot of skill and experience still involved.
True. As a developer I could make any thing but don't know how to sell. People lik e peter levios can earn millions with a single index.php and SQLite by reading tutorials. And now gpt would make non programmer more free from devs.
cough there is a common module with an esp32-s2 you can grab for 2EUR. Its cheaper than i can get a pro micro clone. look for "s2-mini" on Ali.
I cannot fathom somebody still using an arduino nano.
I had stocked on 10-20 nanos from some years ago and was cycling through them
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 :)
3d printers are 200$, esp32 is the same cost as arduino nano.
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.
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..
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
Ideas are talking to me so ofte , that it is hard to decide with which one to go. Which one people need?
The state of off the shelf maker tools and parts is insane.
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.
I came across the Kickstarter [1] for this as a Facebook ad and passed over it for all the reasons folks are citing below. Folding hanger? What's the use case? But watching the video, she's really put a lot of thought into this. The system with the paired rod is pretty slick. I love the notches for keeping the hangers spaced.
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...
Worth noting this is Simone Giertz, she's a very popular maker on the internet, and her youtube channel has over 2M subscribers.
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?
It is a cool design, but 3 years? She definitely worked on other projects in that time.
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.
She did not have brain cancer. She had a benign tumor that was surgically removed.
She also underwent radiation treatment because parts were around her optical nerve.
It's so nice she got over it! She's really like a sunshine
I think the main delay is probably turnaround time on later prototypes. It takes a while to get something custom made, get injection molds done, get a prototype out of them, so like the idea is that she would have been working on this for 3 years, but not constantly on it for free years.
Getting anything done with custom PCBs is the same sorta design, order, wait, assemble, test, repeat process. So while it may take 50~250 hours of work to make just the electrical portion of a DEF CON badge, that 50~250 hours may take place over 6 months.
Oh yes and that! Must've been a terrible experience. So yeah, "3 years" is a little click-baity, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do for marketing.
I marvel at the pedantry on HN sometimes...the 3 year comment is the thing you're locking on?
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.
the 3 year comment is the thing you're locking on?
What do you mean by locking on?
You can only mention the period of time something was developed if NOTHING else occurs at the same time?
I think "I worked on a coat hanger for 3 years would be more clear." "I spent 3 years" literaly means that three years were used (spent) on it. Also it being the title of the video implies that. Basically, in terms of the title of the video, which is supposed to tell you the main idea, from the fact that the title isn't "I developed a new coat hanger" but "I spent 3 years working on a new coathanger," one might think that the three years were literaly spent on the coathanger. Putting numbers in a video title genrally improves clickrate. Also the fact that it took 3 years is more of a shocking claim so that in itself improves the click rate, which is somewhat dimminished if she took a 1.5 year break in between or something. I havn't watched the video by the way so my thoughts are based only on what I think the title implies, which is anyway what the discussion at hand is. All this said I do think it is possible three year were spent (or spent to the maximum extent possible). Lead times can be long in manufacuring and it is possible to spend a year just on verification and testing. The past few years has also seen a lot of supply chain issues.
3 years is 9.467e+7 seconds. What percentage of that time would you think she'd have to spend, in order for the title to be accurate?
Sure, she's playing to the algorithm, but it's far from the most egregous example I've seen of it.
To me the lower bound is not taking long breaks from the project. I know I've "spent three years" on projects that I worked on for a month and then continued for another month years later. And if I start them again now then it would be even longer.
I was also thinking that the nearly 200 orders for a single coat hanger must be more of a sign of support for the creator than a sign of demand for the product.
I think the crease comes not from folding but rather from stacking other clothes on top of it once it's folded.
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?!" :)
Also, where are trousers supposed to go now?
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.
this hanger has custom plastic parts. 3 years does not sound exaggerated. it's not 3 years of a full time job, but 3 years from concept to being ready for production sounds plausible.
It is a cool design, but 3 years? She definitely worked on other projects in that time.
She's a nice lady, but 9 months to incubate? Her mother definitely did other things in that time.
If you are not worried about the crease this might cause down the middle,
There is a claim this won't happen.
She definitely worked on other projects in that time.
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.
Yup. My reaction when I saw the KickStarter campaing: it's Simone Giertz, so it's legit. If it were just some rando who's not a name I recognize from the DIY sphere, I'd assume it's fraud.
I bet many people will buy it because of who made it, even if they don't need it.
Cue the low-quality foreign made knock off branded as “Amazon’s Choice” in 3… 2…
And then the copies of the Chinese copies from Amazon itself…
It’s theft all the way down
But I'm sure she's patented it and amazon wouldn't want to get caught for intellectual property theft so will be diligent about policing sellers. They wouldn't want a bad reputation. And the customs office will destroy any imported product in violation of her patents.
You cannot patent a foldable coat hanger. The only thing she could patent is the specific mechanism she used to enable folding, but I doubt the copycats would use exactly the same design.
Technically, they could patent every variant that was in her bin, which would at least present some challenge to a knock off.
You can't do that IIRC, because it is based on prior art in the public domain. Just like you can't patent a chair with 5 legs.
There's also no reason to patent that many things for the same thing. You only need to be sufficiently vague to how it folds.
IANAL, but I've gotten a few patents rejected.
You can't do that IIRC, because it is based on prior art in the public domain. Just like you can't patent a chair with 5 legs.
A point she made in the video (and at least partially confirmed by a quick patent search by me) is that there really isn't one of these in the prior art.
There's also no reason to patent that many things for the same thing. You only need to be sufficiently vague to how it folds.
As far as patents are concerned, those are the same. Getting a patent broad enough to cover all her embodiments of the invention is the same as getting a patent that covers all the prototypes. In the US you get up to three "free" independent claims per patent application, that can cover different approaches that are non-overlapping. But they can't be addressed to different inventions. In other words, you can get a single patent on three reasonable variations of a folding coat hanger and slight variations thereof. You cannot get a single patent that covers a folding coat hanger, and precision timing device, and a popcorn maker.
Source: IAAPL
Sure you can patent a folding coat hanger, in fact someone did recently in granted US patent US1139964B2 [0].
If you look at the claim, which defines the scope of the monopoly, you'll see it is very long. That is because folding coat hangers were already invented and reinvented many times over. Some example published applications would be US4997115A [1], US5632422A.
I've not looked at the OP yet, but I'd be surprised if they had a new invention in this space; possible of course.
A lot of these things don't make it to be products because they're too expensive for the utility they provide.
[0] https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/0748815...
[1] https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/0231371...
That's his point though. You can't patent "Claim 1: a folding coat hanger".
The only thing she could patent is the specific mechanism she used to enable folding
Have only had a brief look at the video but the folding mechanism looks like the standard figure-of-8 rubber things that join the various parts of folding clothes dryers (eg. [0] from John Lewis) - which makes sense! It's a proven design!
[0] https://johnlewis.scene7.com/is/image/JohnLewis/238949258alt...
But Amazon could patent the concept of "1-click payment"..
You can also protect your design. You dont have to patent it.
Let me add some more sarcasm: destroying perfectly fine products because they "violate" some abstract concept is not insane at all. It's just what humans do.
Like meatballs and tortillas
Any and all good ideas
Whether tasty or not
Instead of being forgot
Will eventually be sold in IKEAsIf this is sold in Ikea, expect the most conflicted take about being Swedish since the war.
"Design wants to be free"
If she has a patent, she can sue not only Amazon, but purchasers of the product as well.
In theory. Anyone can sue anyone at any time for any reason. Winning is different. In reality if you don’t have a bottomless legal warchest, good luck.
The notched rod looks neat, but isn't rifling through the clothes on the rack kind of an essential part of the experience? Can't do that with a notched rod.
First time I'm illustrating a comment with stock footage: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/studio-shot-of-hand...
I think the idea is in a large part aimed at van-lifers, so a notched rod could be quite beneficial
There are too few of them to justify the production run costs.
There is no reason to believe this.
And yet, the Kickstarter has achieved triple their goal already.
There's practically zero hanging clothes storage in a typical van build. Shelves and drawers use the space much more efficiently.
yeah...exactly
It's for your own clothes if you are space limited, if you can store full hangers then you just wouldn't use these.
It's not a kind of experience I want to be consciously aware of. However, I find the notches too limiting - I can fit 3x as much clothes on a rod.
Yeah, it's kind of cool. But $20 for one foldable coat hanger is pretty outrageous, esp. considering that wire coat hangers you get at a cleaner's are virtually free, and you can fold them by hand.
Not the same thing! Sure! But close. And almost free.
I paid about $22 each to fill my closet with cherry wood coat hangers from the Container Store.
The Kickstarter is already double-funded.
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.
The Kickstarter is already double-funded.
More than triple-funded just 5 hours after your comment.
Not the product is the goal, it is the journey.
The production quality of that video was super high.
No doubt that’s helping a lot.
Folding hanger? What's the use case?
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.
Looks so simple, but I guess that's a sign of good design. I was also surprised something like this didn't exist already.
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.
Looks so simple, but I guess that's a sign of good design.
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...")
I used to embarassingly think that design was merely a matter of aesthetics until I read The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, which opened my eyes to how much thought goes into seemingly simple things. Really changed the way I look at human-designed objects.
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!
idea of making top surfaces slanted in public spaces to keep people from placing empty drinking cups and such on top of them
That's a low-key example of hostile architecture, isn't it? Other than preventing people from leaving cups around, this decreases the utility of public space. Everyone sometimes finds themselves suddenly needing a flat surface other than pavement for a couple of seconds or minutes. Say you've grabbed multiple coffee cups wrongly, or packed your groceries badly, and need to repack. Or something fragile you carried broke. Or you need to make a note on the spot. A raised flat surface nearby is godsend in such situations.
It is an interesting thing though. Why did the design lead too people leaving the cups behind? I get the hostile part as they do not want to clean up other peoples trash. It is something I think about a lot on the way to work. I see gum on the ground. Not like one or two here and there but hundreds of little blobs on the sidewalk. What is causing people in these particular spots to leave their gum behind and then putting the chore of cleaning it up on someone else. I even see it when there is a trash can nearby many times. What is causing the issue? So yeah so sometimes there is no 'clear fix' but making it seriously inconvenient to do something is an option for those who have to pay to clean it up. So we all suffer because of that.
Yep. The primary fault lies with the too-many people who abused the non-hostile system. "This is why we can't have nice things"--because trust is too costly in the societies where hostile architecture is prevalent.
I get that and agree. But why is the 'easy path' to leave the garbage even in conditions where there is a garbage can right there? Shame and motivation probably seem like the wrong tools here. It seems like something is lending it to us just not doing it the right way. It is like something in the architecture lends itself to people just ignoring the obvious way. My wife was telling me about a 'gum wall' at an amusement park. I immediately saw that as a way for the park to basically hack people to not throw their gum on the sidewalk. Basically a weird reward for keeping your gum and putting it on that wall. The architecture and mythos encouraged people to not do it.
I agree that those flat surfaces would be great, except you'd have to shift other peoples' sticky leftover cups and bottles out of the way first. :(
Or you are my wife, didn't realize it wasn't flat, and now your plastic bottle is bouncing down the mountain side and part of the trash littering the place.
She labels her prototypes in the video on the Kickstarter page and the one that either ended up being the final design or very close to it was prototype number 134. So it did take her quite a long time to arrive at the solution.
It's never a linear path either, I am sure she branched down paths not used in the final design and spent many hours solving small parts of solutions she never actually used.
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.
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).
You need the coat hanger but you also need the coat rack, more specifically - the dowel, to be really close to the wall.
Curtain rods are a solved problem with widespread availability across the quality spectrum, this is a total non-issue.
ehhhhhhh i'm not so sure about it.
I think the details matter. Curtain rods are typically 1-4" from the wall. This product looks like it works best <0.5" [0] from the wall otherwise it's possible the hanger will move around or have a "sagging" look.
Finding curtain rods that are that close is uncommon and limited in styles/options (I didn't see one on a quick amazon/aliexpress search). That's not to say you're wrong, but I don't think it's as simple as you believe it to be.
[0] https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/043/060/840/f8e1ace8b30ae8b...
Are you misunderstanding something? Clothes Railings are "normally" fixed on the ends (to the wall of the cupboard) or from above and can thus, be positioned any distance from the rear wall.
Do an Image Search for "Clothes Railing U Bracket" for example.
Having two sidewalls available such that u brackets work is probably not a good use case for this hanger. Usually it means you're inside a closet?
But I agree you could build/attach small sidewalls or simply blocks and use this u bracket. But we've entered DIY space since it's not a common package and "readily available" as a solved problem.
From comments I read elsewhere, there are apparently apartments in places like New York that have non-standard depth closets that don't fit regular hangers that these could be useful for, and the van-life crowd has also been mentioned. In both instances, a regular rod mounted on either side would work fine.
I think also the negative comments here are missing how commonly closets are built incorrectly without the correct depth for a coat hanger. Not every day, but there are enough people living in condos which had lazy architects/contractors and might appreciate the solution. I've lived in one and seen several others. I couldn't think of another solution besides kids hangers, which wasn't a satisfying compromise.
The ones getting sold on this kickstarter are grooved to keep the hangers at a neat 90 degrees to the wall. With a normal rod the hangers can twist some. Whether or not this is a problem is up to personal taste.
Hopefully she already started the patent process, otherwise it’s either 1) an expired patent 2) an existing patent 3) she actually invented it but won’t profit at all from it
Patenting this for her portfolio maybe, I can design and print a folding plastic hanger in 1 piece in less than 24 hours. A mold not far behind if i reached out to a shop... you raise an interesting point I think gets asked in nearly every YC interview. How do you build your moat or stop any big players from competing with a very similar product. I think she actually misidentified the problem she was trying to solve. In her case, imo, her "secret sauce" would be the space saving clothes rack/furniture AND matching hangers. There is no solution with her hanger in normal clothes racks. so her hanger product actually serves no purpose.
Shit. You do have a really good point. There's not many examples of hanger bars mounted so close to a wall or in a tiny closet already. Most people who might use this would have to be building or installing one for this custom purpose.
I also wondered if it wouldn't make your shirts more wrinkly or have the potential to leave creases. I don't think anyone cares to invest in a space-saving solution like this if it means all their shirts will be wrinkled or creased. Unless space is the primary constraint, like a tiny apartment, tiny house, or custom van build.
There are plenty of examples of shallow closets in older homes/apartments that were once workers' quarters. I lived in a triple-decker in Somerville, MA that had a bedroom closet that was only deep enough for hooks on the back wall to hold the limited clothing of the occupants. The only way I could use a rod for hangers was to remove the closet door.
Simone's hangers would have been perfect.
Most of the options on Kickstarter include both the hangers and low profile rod/brackets (and a shelf on the fancy one). The tier without a rod included says:
> While using your own rod isn't recommended, we got a lot of requests for it so here you go! Please read our FAQ before buying so you're aware of the pros and cons. Some basic DIY knowhow required.
I think she knows the hanger is only useful as part of a system.
Her Kickstarter does have tiers with brackets/shelves, so yeah, that's already there too.
This is an extremely useful design. I never thought I'd get excited about something like this but I recently moved to an old house with chimney flues running through every room, resulting in shallow alcoves that are of differing sizes.
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.
I thought about it as well but if the rod is attached to a plank on the wall the clothes are 1cm away from the wall allowing for some air circulation.
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.
I find coathangers comically cumbersome, if they could spin willy nilly I just might give up and store my shirts in draw. I already just fold and stack most everything else, the only thing I bother hanging is button down shirts.
Basically any coat hanger not made of wire or a single plastic part has a rotatable hook. There’s usually enough friction that they won’t normally spin.
The other drawback is creasing all of your clothes.
”it will almost certainly be cloned and sold en masse pretty quickly”
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.
I think you underestimate Aliexpress, Wish, Temu, ...
The sheer quantity of goods being shipped in, one-by-one on a daily basis make it impossible to block in any effective manner.
Sadly, the design is most likely going to be copied, mass produced and available on Temu/Amazon/Alibaba within the next several weeks. Kick Starter is basically free R&D for Chinese manufacturers.
The entire US of A is free R&D for Chinese manufacturers. In fact the entirety of China is free R&D for itself as companies in China copy each other.
China is the apex of the open source philosophy taken to the maximum extent.
The entire US of A is free R&D for Chinese manufacturers.
All of China/Asia/Africa are free manufacturing for the West…
Of course, the view that they don’t innovate and only knockoff the West is also hilariously false.
All of China/Asia/Africa are free manufacturing for the West…
Not free. But extremely cheap.
Of course, the view that they don’t innovate and only knockoff the West is also hilariously false.
Of course not. I never made this claim. But in China, the incentive to innovate is much lower due to lack of enforcement of intellectual property rights. So of course in terms of cost/benefit ratio every individual in China is more incentivized to copy someone else's innovation rather than innovate themselves. It's the most logical move.
It's sort of a strange parasitic symbiosis between the US and China that in theory should never work. When China steals ideas and manufacturing from the US and tries to sell it back to the US, one would think there's trade imbalance that would cause the whole thing to break down.
The thing that keeps it afloat is marketing at quality control. China can rip off a product but issues with marketing and QC prevent them from effectively selling it. So what happens is the US uses China to manufacture and then they sell the products at a huge margin above the manufacturing cost to everyone in the world including China.
Everybody gets fucked in this scenario except for US corporations. But at the same time everybody makes enough money such that the whole economic cycle doesn't fall apart.
Of course not. I never made this claim.
I’m aware you left yourself a bit of wriggle room versus the absolute claim. Doesn’t change how it sounds.
When China steals ideas
You know how they say the execution matters, not just the idea?
and manufacturing from the US
US companies bring the plan, but the Chinese factories have unparalleled skills in actually manufacturing the product into reality.
Not sure how you are claiming that they both can and can’t deliver the required quality? Almost everything, high and low quality, can be manufactured in China. Spend the full $$$ value and you’ll get unbeatable quality. But pay peanuts, get cheap things.
marketing at quality control. China can rip off a product
To continue my point above, they take that product and manufacture it with the best cost-value ratio for the mass consumer. You can always get various levels of quality in knockoffs.
sell the products at a huge margin above the manufacturing cost
This is actually connected to my previous post. The West is able to do this solely due to economic and currency disparities, which are further perpetuated by the West. Hence, you get:
Not free. But extremely cheap.
The West is completely dependent on the non-West for labor. It’s such a massive point of failure that the Western lifestyle would fall apart otherwise.
I’m aware you left yourself a bit of wriggle room versus the absolute claim. Doesn’t change how it sounds.
No. What happened here is you interpreted it as a insult to your pride. That did not occur. What occurred was a statement of a fact. It was you're own pride and bias that changed how it sounded.
You know how they say the execution matters, not just the idea?
So. What's your point? Everybody knows this. Why are you stating something obvious? I think you were so clouded by your pride that you can't see that I'm neutral. I really don't care. Your tone only became neutral when you realized I was a neutral party. You were blinded by your own pride when you thought you were communicating with an "enemy" and when you realized I'm neutral that cleared your mind. Now you're talking some sense.
Not sure how you are claiming that they both can and can’t deliver the required quality? Almost everything, high and low quality, can be manufactured in China. Spend the full $$$ value and you’ll get unbeatable quality. But pay peanuts, get cheap things.
I said marketing AND QC. There's a ton of low quality shit coming out of China. A ton. There's a ton of high quality stuff too that's behind a wall of bad marketing. You just need to compare TEMU and Amazon.
You say you're not sure how I made a claim that they can and cant' deliver the required quality then RIGHT after that statement you say almost everything high and low quality comes out China. So you aren't sure how I can make such a "claim" then you make the SAME claim right after that sentence. That makes no sense.
To continue my point above, they take that product and manufacture it with the best cost-value ratio for the mass consumer. You can always get various levels of quality in knockoffs.
Quality is inconsistent enough that Chinese products are associated with poor quality. Additionally the marketing is just bad, your products may be made in China but the brand is rarely ever Chinese.
This is actually connected to my previous post. The West is able to do this solely due to economic and currency disparities, which are further perpetuated by the West. Hence, you get:
Good we're in agreement.
The West is completely dependent on the non-West for labor. It’s such a massive point of failure that the Western lifestyle would fall apart otherwise.
Not completely dependent. And not permanently dependent. Advanced manufacturing is still very much US exclusive. For example, boeing air liners. China does not know how to manufacture those things yet. And given the fact the US knows advanced manufacturing they can implement basic manufacturing again if the need arises. BUT, and this is a huge but, as more and more time passes with America not reinvigorating manufacturing they will slip deeper and deeper into permanent dependence.
But overall we're in agreement here. Next time be more careful before you charge in with your guns armed. It's better to be neutral as you see the world with clearer eyes.
No. What happened here is you interpreted it as an insult to your pride.
You see, the thing is, I’m not even incidentally or partially Chinese. I just really despise the Western pride and xenophobic judgement people like you cast! I don’t know how you claim to be neutral, but I’m definitely not attempting to be neutral.
Anyways, I’m also gonna end my argument here. I see no value.
I'm Chinese by race. A US citizen by birth. As such I hold no pride for either country.
How can I be xenophobic against my own race? Additionally how can I be xenophobic against people in my own country who I grew up with?
You don't realize the extent of true neutrality. I see what is now. You're not all about patriotism or pride. You're on the side of idealized fairness. Where all things are unrealistically equal.
the Western lifestyle
Is that a placeholder for 'over consumption perpetuated through mass brain-washing (advertising)'? Or is there more to it?
o/s is where you share your designs freely, not just rip others off.
China copies everything and everyone else, but then still tries to keep it's own secrets.
There are non-GPL licenses in open source. So MIT license does allow you to 'just rip off'.
The use of "rip off" when referring to a copy, typically means copies done illicitly or of poor quality. Being permitted to do so is antithetical to this.
o/s is where you share your designs freely, not just rip others off.
It's effectively the same thing. It's just connotations. In fact China has a lot of bad connotations associated with everything they do so it's hard to talk about the country in an unbiased way. There's so much pride and patriotism that gets introduced into the equation especially given the fact that it's on track to overtake the US in terms of economic size.
On the other hand, open source has too much good connotations associated with the term. If the core philosophy was exploited to the maximum extent you essentially get China.. where the incentive to innovate is much less than the incentive to copy someone else's innovation.
China copies everything and everyone else, but then still tries to keep it's own secrets.
Doesn't everybody do this? The US full of closed source and open source code/products? The thing with China is that stopping illegal copying is unlikely to be enforced so the only defense against intellectual property in China is secrecy.
In the US both secrecy and law are used for protection and many companies and people exploit both of these tools.
Bunny calls it Gongkai:
Further investigation taught me that the Chinese have a parallel system of traditions and ethics around sharing IP, which lead me to coin the term “gongkai”. This is deliberately not the Chinese word for “Open Source”, because that word (kaiyuan) refers to openness in a Western-style IP framework, which this not. Gongkai is more a reference to the fact that copyrighted documents, sometimes labeled “confidential” and “proprietary”, are made known to the public and shared overtly, but not necessarily according to the letter of the law. However, this copying isn’t a one-way flow of value, as it would be in the case of copied movies or music. Rather, these documents are the knowledge base needed to build a phone using the copyright owner’s chips, and as such, this sharing of documents helps to promote the sales of their chips. There is ultimately, if you will, a quid-pro-quo between the copyright holders and the copiers.
The entire US of A is free R&D for Chinese manufacturers.
And in return the entire US of A gets to buy these of $2 instead of $20.
Let's be real. 7 dollars (inc tax & shipping probably more) for a coat hanger? 0.5 dollars and i'm in, maybe. Cool idea, not for everyone, not life changing thing like a lot of people here are saying.
Well, wide-spread copying might be 'sadly' for her, but it would be good for consumers.
Is it good for consumers when inventors don't bother inventing anything because they know any good idea will be ripped off, regardless of patents or other protections?
In the short term, but in the long term it can kill new ideas before they are shared.
I have more questions about the enormously high bed stand in the opening shot. It immediately makes tons of sense (so much otherwise wasted vertical space in a room), but I have never seen such a thing.
She has a video on that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inVvXS6gA8c
I am upset she put in all that effort and did not stain the wood.
That might be because she's Swedish. As a Scandinavian it's always a bit weird seeing Americans staining wood, it's not really something you'd do, unless you're trying to make it lighter. Americans, and the British, loves staining wood, making it darker. That's kinda the opposite of what you do in Scandinavia. You keep everything light, bright and natural (if possible, pine has a tendency to yellow and that not really fashionable).
Don’t you need to finish the wood somehow in order to protect it from random stains?
There are light stains that can make the wood grain pop. But you are correct, to my American eye, that unfinished look really detracts from the full effort.
It's not because they love staining wood, it's because the predominant species of trees in those areas are those that take better to staining.
In Scandinavia you'll get a lot of it pine, which is one of the types of wood which typically doesn't need staining, especially for indoor applications.
In the Kickstarter video the wood is painted (and she has sensibly removed the goofy leaves on the sides, which were obviously only going to get in the way).
I thought the side walls were there to ensure she did not roll off the bed in the night and die from the fall.
Funnily you can see some coat hingers prototype at the end of the video :).
And while showing that, she says "I promise the next video won't take 3 months to make". 3 Years late:
I spent 3 years working on a coat hanger
Well, she technically kept her promise, although the emphasis was on the "months" rather than the "3" it seems.
Looking at her video list, she released 20 videos between the bed video and this hanger video. This one -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYqz1F6eAVU <- came out about 2 weeks after the bed video. So, she very much kept her promise. Just sayin.
It's called a loft bed - this one would probably be considered a low loft. This kind of bed is also frequently seen in American university dorm rooms.
Ah of course. I had a loft bed in college, though it was hollow underneath for my desk. Seeing it as a less ramshackle structure with built-in drawers was new to me.
Falling hazard.
I just saw the Kickstarter[1]. The margins on these coat hangers look so good that it'd make NVIDIA blush.
[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simonegiertz/coat-hinge...
The margins are likely not that great.
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.
Wooden hangers retail for around €1 here, and it's ~2.5x cheaper if you look at AliExpress. Note that both are retail, the wholesale prices are probably half of that. €19 for a hanger is ridiculously expensive, even if they're individually hand made. Granted it includes shipping, but even if shipping is 50% of the cost, it's still absurdly expensive.
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.
€19 for a hanger is ridiculously expensive
€19 for a hanger is the wrong way to look at this. There's no useful application where you'd buy a single hanger. This appears to simply be a way to provide people that want to toss €19 of support to someone they like doing something cool a little something in return.
The 12 hanger package is $75, which makes the per-hanger cost of $6.25 still a bit high, but well within an order of magnitude of other high-end products in the category.
or just to try it out. But that, like it, and then buy in bulk. I have seen some -massive' amounts of cloths stuff in closets.
Here's a fancy wooden coathanger from Muji that's 20 bucks
https://www.muji.us/collections/hooks-hangers/products/woode...
Yeah because the people making those cheap coat hangers aren't paying retail prices for materials. That was his point.
They also aren't paying western salaries for R&D.
Yeah, I worked at one small scale place. Our final products were very expensive (around $5k-$20k, depending on features). The case that the instrument went into cost us almost $150 a pop from a local metal shop, which was (relatively) small and easy to add on to the price of the device, so the customer barely noticed anyway. Of course, we had people who'd worked in mass-produced ventures who complained constantly that it would be so much cheaper in large batches. They projected $5-15 per case, if only we sold in bulk, of course we didn't so it was lunch talk for years. They knew why we didn't bother for more “molded” parts made in China and such, but still never let it go. :)
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
Where is the COGS mentioned?
True, I think it's fair that these hangars are a bit more expensive, given they're clearly more niche (so no huge production runs are happening) and given the extra thickness you can clearly see just looking at them.
1. This is a kickstarter, not retail. It’s meant to also kickstart the project by providing funding to set up the factory, train assembly staff, and recoup R&D costs.
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.
I really like her videos but I don't understand how this solves the problem in a better way than any of the obvious alternatives and it kind of bothers me that she doesn't address this at all in the video. All she does is say "there are no folding coat hangers on the market".
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 you hang them at 45 degree the depth will be reducted by sqrt(2). (about 0.7 x hanger length), and you will lose space on each side. And the more you increase the angle, the more you will lose space on the sides. With this technique, you will reduce the depth to 0.5 x hanger length and not lose space on the side.
With this solution you lose the most space on the side because of the notched rod. The notches have to be wide enough for a the thickest stuff, but then a shirt will take as much space as thick coat.
If your goal is to save as much depth as possible the solution is obviously front to back direction rods, as opposed to side to side. There's plenty of options available from retractable ones to wall mounted ones that don't require a closet and so on.
The notches have to be wide enough for a the thickest stuff, but then a shirt will take as much space as thick coat.
It's probably easier to take out a hinger and let a thick coat take up two spaces (or more). Assuming you have only few coats, that's more efficient than increasing the spacing uniformly.
It does seem like you lose some flexibility due to the slots, though.
It also seems possible to put many more slots in the rod. There is no functional reason why slots and hingers need to match 1 on 1.
If your goal is to save as much depth as possible the solution is obviously front to back direction rods, as opposed to side to side.
Somehow it feels like it would be harder to store the same amount of clothes on front-to-back rods. I also think it would be harder to browse clothes and take out the shirt you want; even with the retractable rod you have to pull out and push in rods just to see what's on them.
Yes, but folding the clothes doubles their thickness, so you can fit fewer hingers on a single rod than traditional hangers.
Also the coat hinger system uses fixed distance between the hingers (due to the slots in the rod) which seems like it would be less efficient: thick sweaters and thin T-shirts take up the same width.
It's actually not clear if the hinger system works all that well if you need to hang a lot of thick clothes; the rack looks pretty crowded in the available pictures.
I guess you would have to try this in practice to see which system works better. I wouldn't be surprised if it boils down to "the 45 degree angle is better, but the coat hinger looks neater".
She says that there are foldable coat hangers but none fold while hanging while holding clothes.
I have no idea if this is true or not but that is the problem statement.
That sounds like a solution attempt masquerading as a problem statement. Repeating it does not answer the question: “but why do you want a foldable coat hanger which can fold while hanging”.
Repeating it does not answer the question: “but why do you want a foldable coat hanger which can fold while hanging”.
The goal of folding something is almost always to reduce its length.
These are nine inches long when folded, ordinary hangers are seventeen inches long. [1]
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/simonegiertz/coat-hinge...
She did address it by browsing quickly through a Google Images page, which indicates what kind of solutions she encountered.
Nevertheless, fair question.
She looked for foldable coat hangers, not for a space saving solutions. I guess that's fair if that's what she wanted to achieve, but it would be nice to hear why this is a better solution. Looks nicer is a good enough answer of course.
At 45 degrees it will probably still take up more space. And if you hang them flat against the wall in multiple rows and columns, it will take longer to find and get the specific item you want. No matter how you look at it, her hangers still seem like an improvement of life, and she will probably sell tons of them, good for her.
Does anyone know her cancer situation? It almost bummed me out that she got sick as soon as she became popular.
p sure it's a noncancerous tumor, but she hasn't discussed it much (if at all)
My buddy has a non-cancerous brain tumor but it often plays with his hormones and causes his eye to bulge and lose vision so they can be quite nasty even without cancer. The medicine to keep it from growing also makes you lethargic and asexual. That's why I was curious. It can be rough on a person
if i recall correctly, it was operable so they just removed it
Oh great news!
Well, mostly. I seem to recall that she had a recurrence about a year ago or so (pre-edit, 2019 specifically per her wiki page, I'm getting old). But I've been watching her for a while and she seems to still be active and making good videos, so yeah good news I reckon.
It's long over. She went on a speaking tour after recovering from surgery in 2019 or so.
She mentioned it briefly in a few of her tesla videos, she did apparently go through chemo but that was 4 years ago and I don't see it in a more recent one so I'm guessing she's in remission?
I feel she doesn't want what she went through for her medical woes to not be a big part of what people think about when they think of her. I'm assuming that but it's the impression I get.
she hasn't talked about it as far as I know (it's definitely in none of her YT videos or more obvious social stuff) and in every video she looks extremely healthy and seems reasonably upbeat and i'm going to be really pissed if she is sick again, so, I'm really hoping no news is good news.
Those wire hangers are murder in clothes. You want thick wooden hangers that will last you a lifetime.
For anyone who wants the best hangers that money can buy, Kirby Allison is what you want: https://www.kirbyallison.com/pages/the-hanger-project-story
What makes them so spiffy?
I think you can buy better hangers fwiw. In particular, more accurately sized for the jacket and with more shape around the collar. Though obviously ‘better’ is relative – if you’re hanging shirts or trousers you don’t need nearly as much shape.
When my son was about 5 months old, he was crawling in the bathroom floor while I was getting dressed in the adjacent walk-in closet. He was playing with the closet door and closed it. I didn't think much of it, but then I noticed that he had also opened a drawer which prevented me from opening the door from the closet (terrible apartment design!). I was stuck in the closet alone, without my phone, unable to get out. I panicked a little bit since it was early in the day and my spouse wouldn't return in about 10 hours. Long story short, I McGyver'ed my way out thanks to a wire hanger that I found in the closet: I straightened it and used it to push the drawer back in through the tiny slit that was left through the door and the frame. I used to hate wire hangers too, now I make sure I always have a few in every closet, just in case, you never know :)
That's a hilarious story. Thanks for posting!
This looks thicker than typical wire hangers
Unless space is at a premium, in which case a folding hanger almost halves the horizontal space clothes hanging takes.
Correct, I’m a little shocked people actually buy non-wood hangers. Metal is just trash the dry cleaner gives you. Plastic is what people somehow end up with in college.
Here’s an idea. Instead of the rod being parallel with the wall, have multiple small rods perpendicular to the wall. They can easily accommodate full size coat hangers. Problem solved
Here’s an idea. Instead of the rod being parallel with the wall, have multiple small rods perpendicular to the wall. They can easily accommodate full size coat hangers. Problem solved
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.
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.
Someone linked the "parallel to the wall" hanger here https://www.amazon.ca/Retractable-Adjustable-Wardrobe-Clothi... and it costs a lot. If you want to put multiple ones next to each other, it becomes quite expensive.
Also access to items behind other items becomes harder and slower. And it requires a shelf above to secure to.
Horizontal pole and foldable hanger design still seems like a simpler and better approach. The design seems so good that I bet you will be able to order these from China in a couple of years for less than a dollar.
Ikea has them for pretty cheap, though they are made to fit inside their closets.
I like this simple solution, but it makes it difficult to see all your clothes and which article you want.
It's common for them to be stacked like stairs or if there's more space to slide out, so that's not usually an issue. Sometimes it's kinda both (stairs that pop up).
Twist the hook 45 degrees. Save square root of whatever the coat hanger width is. There's some wasted space in corners though.
Ha, good idea. Something like this, right?: https://www.richelieu.com/us/en/category/closet-and-storage/...
Not sure how much it costs, but it doesn't look difficult to make. There might be patents though.
Original submission title was "Why Simone Giertz spent 3 years working on a coat hanger", moderators changed it to "I spent 3 years working on a coat hanger", the title of the video is "Why I spent 3 years working on a coat hanger".
the very first sentence she says in her video is "I spent 3 years working on a coat hanger". is there something about the title that bothers you? I get when someone complains that a title is misleading, but I don't understand the commentary when the meaning is basically the same and the person commenting didn't even seem to have watched the first 3 seconds of the video.
I am not related to her in any way other than being her subscriber on YouTube, yet my nickname is attached to the HackerNews submission, and with current title I expect that somebody will eventually think that I am she, or that I pretend to be her.
You're totally right. I really dislike the way mods edit titles here...
email hn@ycombinator.com and ask dang to change it back, and tell him that reason.
I get the reason, but there's no need to worry. Most people here know that links aren't personal unless it's a Show/Ask/Tell HN. You can find other examples on the front page.
HN has a thing against questions in titles because a lot of them are clickbait. I don't care about this rule but that's why it was changed.
"I" in a title refers to the author of the post (or video in this case). There's no implication that the author is also the submitter.
For example, I think I need to go lie down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38288130 was on the front page for 20 hours yesterday, but it wasn't the submitter who thought they needed to go lie down.
In terms of taking out the person's name, we do that a lot in titles—especially when it wasn't that way in the original—because HN works better when the focus is on content rather than personalities.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I understand that it's counter to the very specific brand of minimalism HN does, but it would be neat if Youtube submissions displayed the channel name without needing to click.
Even if it worked the way that twitter URLs get displayed with the user's handle in the site section.
Probably easier to do now that youtube has moved to @handles.
Love the iteration story, but like, what about pants? And thick winter coats? And stuff I don't want a weird potential fold line slightly to the left/right of centre?
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 normally fold my pants in half vertically and over the hanger. How do you normally do this?
Some examples here, most of which should work with her hanger size:
For others' reference: the "one leg over, then the other leg over the other way" is how you hang a bespoke suit's pants. No special hanger needed, the cloth's opposite drag provides enough friction to keep it on. The hangar for the cuffed pants is good for keeping the cuffs in shape (but who wears cuffs?)
I fold the legs together (fold along the zipper, basically) and put them through the hole, which folds them again roughly above the knee.
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.
You can have more than one storage location for clothes; put items that wouldn’t fit on this rack in a closet.
in the video on the Kickstarter she show how you can hang pants
I think pants would work, if you put them in legs first.
Yeah, I normally put a number of items through the coat hanger and the hinge, here, would prevent that.
I feel like it should come with some clips on the bottom for attaching items like trousers and other odd-shaped garments.
I forgot who she was, so:
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,
She has tried (and quite successfully imho) to move away from that image and become a respectable creator/inventor.
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.
I'm sure the success was partly due to the fact that the "shittiness" of the robots was because they were iterative prototypes, not because she was inept. Part of what's great about her (and other similar creators') content is that you get to actually see the design and development process, including the failures, which is both entertaining and educational.
The shitty robots were built to be shitty. They were successful because they were funny.
Her initial period as the queen of shitty robots has little to nothing to do with what she does today or how she approaches problems.
She has talked about the anxiety that came with going from “no one can really criticize my stuff because it’s meant to be bad” to “this is actually supposed to be good, but is it good enough?”
Kevin Scott (the CTO of Microsoft) interviewed her in an episode of his podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/simone-giertz-inventor...
Lex Fridman too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgIo36F6Fsg — great 2-hour conversation.
Ah, I remember that. And I couldn't help but notice she had over 2M subscribers so clearly she's got a lot of fans already.
Her Truckla video is hilarious but serious at the same time !
Imagine my surprise when, after watching Truckla all those years ago, I saw the Cyber Truck's design.
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.
A model S based Yute would sell like hotcakes in Australia :D
Ute, short for utility vehicle: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ute
Ah, the Australian pronunciation is throwing me off, TIL :)
A model 3 (or maybe model y) platform-based truck would be incredible
edit: I've been told they're the same platform
She has a fake car commercial video for it as well, that is just top tier parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R35gWBtLCYg
Pull out retractable closet rod.
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.
Much goofier looking though.
There are nice looking high end options and plastic aliexpress versions. And everything in between. Bonus, the design works for pants or textiles since it does everything normal hanger does. These "space saving" solutions have been thought through for decades. I like the aesthetic of her design, but it kind of fails at being a good versatile hanger. Seems like it's good for storing a few articles of frequently used clothing where one doesn't need to consider long term creasing, basically a slight upgrade from a few nails on the wall.
Or also just coat hangers that have a rotating top (most with a wooden body and a metal top have that). There were also some really viable solutions displayed on the Google image search that were just glossed over.
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.
Yeah, my main gripe is the design seems like a subpar hanger.
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.
My thought as well. The disadvantage though is that you need to move a "pack" of hung clothes and turn them around (or pull them out) to find the one you're looking for. In the folded arrangement, you can probably find what you're looking for at a glance, from a distance.
I used to like her videos, but found out that she takes other people's work and passes it off as her own. This video is a good example. Anyone reading the title and watching the video, it appears that she's done all of the work iterating on the prototypes. No one else is mentioned in doing any of the work.
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
All companies need a face, Simone clearly is the one for her brand. She keeps talking about how "we" went through iterations in the video too, not claiming to be the sole inventor and designer.
It's not like the people doing presentations for Apple, Google or Samsung 100% made the stuff themselves either.
Perhaps the co-inventor hates talking to camera and is perfectly happy that she does this part of the process.
No one else is mentioned in doing any of the work.
She mentions two people by name in the video
At the end we can never know but the fact that she may have now delegated the handling of the production to someone else does not exactly mean she did not work on the original idea/prototype.
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
I am just assuming that she bankrolled the development herself from the income her youtube makes:
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.
If you want to save space why hang your clothes? Stacking them is easy and does not require another object to be used.
Read vs Write optimization.
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.
In stacking case, it is "expensive" to Read
It's not a stack data structure. You can pull out items from the middle of a stack.
Plus folding the shirt in the first place takes more effort.
This is a skill which can be optimized to be very quick to do.
How do you pull items out from the middle of a stack of neatly folded clothes without collapsing the whole stack?
I really need a tutorial on this :D
I've just started hanging all my shirts. Basically I have a set amount of coat hangers. If i want a new shirt I need to sacrifice another. It also makes drying way easier. Out of the washing machine, onto a coat hanger, onto the washing line, straight into the wardrobe once dry.
Some clothes do better hung up.
Isn't the point of a coat hanger to hang your clothes uncrumpled? If you're compromising on that aspect, wouldn't wall hooks fit most use cases?
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.
There is a pretty major difference between crumpled and folded. A soft/wide radius fold isn't going to leave wrinkles or a major crease but it may still be noticeable.
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.
Speaking of crumples, it's interesting that the final design makes the apparent compromise of not folding the clothes down the middle, but slightly off to the side.
But in the discarded invention pile we can see an older design that folds down the exact middle (it has springs on the bottom).
Stacking vertically does kinda get there but there are some clear downsides. You can't access clothes in the back without taking off the whole stack. And it's visually a lot worse: you're just looking at like 5 shirts flattened on the wall instead of a neat line of flat sleeves.
You don't have to take the whole stock off the hook or rack, you just grab one of the hangers and move the item to the side.
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.
This won't crumple anything other than the most rigid/starchy of clothes.
Can’t this already easily be accomplished and even flatter to the wall simply by using a hanger with a swiveling head? Only downsides compared to this invention would be the way the different items nested together and the fact that they stuck out to the sides 50% of each hanger at the ends?
Well, being nested together leads to the downside that you can only easily add and remove things at the end of the rack, while with OPs solution you can easily insert and remove from random points of the rack.
Array vs Hash table!
Seriously, and you can accomplish something similar with a regular hanger and just a single nail. You hang the hanger on the nail flat against the wall, then the next hanger can be daisy chained on the exposed neck of the previous hanger and so on.
Seems like they won’t work without the special notched rod with evenly spaced grooves.
Why not?
I obviously haven’t tried it, but the video does not show the new hanger being used on the old rod that was implied to be the initial goal of the project. Instead, they only show the hanger being used on rods with special grooves or notches cut into it. Making such a special rod seems to be a lot of work, and I assume that they wouldn’t do that unless it was necessary. But most importantly, it seems to me that the hanger would just collapse if put on a regular smooth rod.
I found https://www.kangaroohanger.com/ to be a more practical and viable "actually better" clothes hanger.
These are neat, but solve a different problem than the hangers from the submission.
It looks good but, ehm, they're not trying to solve the same problem. Giertz's hanger looks entirely practical to me for what it's trying to do.
The GIF on the kickstarter is a nice TLDR: https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/043/049/335/c230c7314b0668e...
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.
I'm having a hard time imagining this. How would you get it to lie flush against the wall?
You would need to position the clothes rod not so close to the wall. There is another common design of closets that this design omits - adjustable depth of rod, via repositioning of the rod flanges
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Project-Source-1-5-16-in-Flange-Set...
First reaction was; "This is really dumb. It'll take up twice the width."
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.
RVs frequently have closets where this is a problem. I ended up buying tiny hangers, but would rather have had this.
Excellent point. Experienced that pain last year.
I spent 3 hours writing this message ... that is, I started 3 hours ago, paused that immediately, then went and did other things for 2:59:30hrs, finally I came back and finished typing this textual masterpiece.
She's a successful inventor & youtuber, good on her. the product is not bad actually, a great impulse buy (gifting), just not for me.
This is a very critical reply, and for what? Throwing "just not for me" at the end doesn't negate the 95% of the message that's unnecessarily harsh.
by your logic, ending your reply with "unnecessarily harsh" means your message was "unnecessarily harsh" if I didn't agree with some of the preceding sentences? such as your fictitious stats "95% of the message".
it's not for me means that I wouldn't buy the product or invest/fund it, but i saw potential in two market segments "impulse buying" and "gifting". my message was mixed and clearly stated that - usually businesses/inventors/makers like mixed feedback.
all the best.
Theres something so refreshing about these videos by makers (also adam savage, mark rober, lots of others) where they just emphasize how many failed attempts it takes before they end up with something "less terrible". Makes everyone seem so... human :)
StuffMadeHere (https://www.youtube.com/@StuffMadeHere) is one of my favorites in this regard.
Don't forget I did a thing https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJLZe_NoiG0hT7QCX_9vmqw
Reminds me of "Noiseless completely silent drape runner"
The owls are not what they seem
Gotta light!
This is a solved problem. Solved by making the hook rotatable so you can hang the clothes at an angle and thus save the same amount of room as with the discussed method, without all the downsides. I wonder if that inventor was also showered in cash and attention. I wonder if it also took them 3 years.
I think there is more to it and should not be dismissed out of hand.
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.
Id say my proposed system is the one most commonly in use. If you google "coat hanger" I'd say 90% of them have turning heads. What I don't see existing is shallow closets.
I really like the idea, but it only makes sense if you custom build your hanger on the wall, that is, there is no commercially available (afaik) hanger that would make this useful. But this may be an opportunity for a second product and sell it with the coat hangers, and people would spend more on furniture than a coat hanger.
The rail is part of the Kickstarter
If the author of the video wanted to solve just her particular case, she would make a diagonal cutouts on her dresser beam and hang the clothes at an angle using standard hangers. She has enough room for that, plus it would look stylish. Over time I came to appreciate solutions like that, you don't want to always solve a general problem.
oh my god you solved the problem, quick make a yt and kickstarter
Congratulations to the inventor.
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.
I think it solves a different issues. This is aiming to solve a depth issue (e.g. a deeper coat rack would make a door hit it, as shown in the video) while a multi layer hanger seems to be more a "I don't have enough space for all the hangers" (but importantly, you have space for at least one!)
That is cool. Would allow you to have shallow cupboards in small rooms.
We already have shallow cupboards in small rooms, the hook in nearly all hangers rotate, or you have a narrow rod with a wide hook. If you don't mind creased clothes you use a drawer or open shelves in the cupboard. Or, use kids hangers that are shorter.
These are the nicest clothes hangers I have in my possession, i.e. they can be used with a lot of different stuff: https://www.topvalu.net/items/detail/4549741790529/
Now I wish they had a hinge too. (Hmm, weekend project?)
I hate these kind of hangers.... my shirts get stuck in the "grooves" when I try to take them off
My great-grandfather had a factory making light furniture and coat hangers, and had several patents for types of adjustable coat hangers. He was expropriated by the soviets after the second world war, in eastern Germany and fled to the west. It's fun to imagine an alternative universe where I am the heir of an adjustable coat hanger empire.
This week on The adventures of Trip Phreeza of the Well Hung Dynasty Phreeza IIIrd goes on a roadtrip to Monte Carlo with the twins of Clan Aglet...
Hmm - does it not generate a crease down the middle of all of your shirts?
Nope...creasing occurs by pressure applied to the fold. If you stack clothes on top of each other the bottom one will be more creased than the top ones.
The fold as done here, without any external force, won't result in a crease
141450€ for coat hangers on which you can't actually hang a real winter coat... (real being one that would be tough enough to not fold in half) that looks a lot like a Juicero
pretty much all the stuff i wear to the office would work on those - this is meant for "ready access" storage not seasonals like a coat
I was hoping this would be the coat hanger I have in my ideas bin for the last three years. I need a coat hanger that can be operated one-handed. (accessibility being invention's other mother) If her design could be easily folded with one hand, letting you insert it into the neck of a T-shirt, and then it automatically reopens by spring, I'd have comfy clothes.
accessibility being invention's other mother
Nice quote, have to remember.
need this in tokyo
When I saw this video earlier this was my immediate thought as well. Would've helped with closets in our old apartment so much.
I live in North Texas what the fuck is a coat hangar gonna do for me compared to the back of a chair for a couple months?
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.
It sounds like you’re stringing a couple of anecdotes together to make a point that this is useless, which it isn’t. Lots of people live in tiny apartments, where sections of your house need to serve more than one purpose (kitchen inside a cupboard for example). If I was in this situation I would consider buying this product.
For me the killer app for a coat hanger would be one that allows you to remove the shirt easily with one hand and without stretching out the shirt or possibly breaking the hanger, just pull to remove the shirt right off the hanger. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to come up with this design, and I’m getting close, the secret is spheres
Honestly I'm most surprised by how few people seem to recognize the channel lol. I figured maker YouTube and the open sauce type crowd would have a bigger level of representation here but I guess we all live in our bubbles!
I want to make V1 of this myself, but actually the cost of the plywood and the metal hinge is probably more costly than this product. I hope they can get it into big stores.
This is so bloody stupid that it’s amazing. It literally solves a valid issue. I have a closet that isn’t deep and have short coat hangers for a bunch of clothes but this would allow my clothes to not sag off the end and fit into the closet nicely and neatly.
Off to kickstarter I go.
A masterclass in persistence and resilience.
It took James Dyson five years and 5,127 prototypes to create a vacuum cleaner based on industrial shop cyclone vacuum technology.
Recently listened to her on Lex Fridman's podcast - would highly recommend. Made me want to dig out the raspberry pi's and esp32 boards from my closet and build something.
And as soon as I saw it I thought what a good solution for getting the hangers inside of the neck opening without stretching the fabric, but the purpose of halving the required storage space is just genius.
Neat middleground between folded clothes heavily creased but stored compactly in drawers and entirely unfolded crease-free hanging clothes. I presume there'll be some creasing, but it's definitely saving space vs. conventional hangers.
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.
She should add a version with shoulder pads, those wires can be pretty deforming
Why is this not a thing? Clothes hangers are designed to keep the structure of the clothing, if this design is used you might as well fold your shirts and use less storage space.
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?
It's Simone Giertz! Internet famous for making useless machines and shitty robots, has now apparently pivoted to making more useful things.
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 was also definitely surprised this didn't already exist; but hey I never thought of it either! My apartment has a bunch of bookshelves with hanging bars in them (?) definitely not big enough for normal hangers unless you turn them sideways and lose a bunch of space.
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.
I wonder if she considered making "extensions that are a bit taller than the vertical distance of the hangers and then you could get even more stuff on one rack as you stagger the shorter and taller hangers.
3 years on this? What a blatant lie. This existed for more than 30 years.
Won’t this create pressure marks on the clothes where the hanger pushes against the wall? Since it’s not hanging symmetrically like a normal coat hanger, the hanger will tilt backwards against the wall due to gravity pulling the front part down.
I love the mindset and the design process. But I never hung any cloths so it is not for me.
I'm sure others have said it too, but Simone is especially talented.
I could see this working really nicely for those clothes in the liminal space between clean and dirty that I inevitably toss on my chair right now.
YouTube hai jika anda memberikan silver play baton anda selamat whahaha
Ah, the classic side quest into a seemingly useless project - I can relate. Spending three years on a coat hanger sounds just like the kind of rabbit hole I'd fall into. It's usually more about the journey and scratching that itch than the end product. But turning it into a business? Now that's impressive. Most of my hyperfocus side quests end up as forgotten userscripts or abandoned github projects. Kudos to her for not only sticking with it but also turning it into something tangible and potentially profitable!
Three years on a clothes hanger design? She's paid to do this?!
"There's a sucker born every minute!" - Old saying
https://medium.com/skeptikai/the-real-story-behind-the-quote...
My first point: This post is part of a launch campaign. We don't want all kickstarter projects to be listed on HN do we?
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 love when people see a problem and they spend a (seemingly) insane amount of time, work and passion to solve it.
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
I'd be interested in tests to see just how much space it actually saves. From personal experience, you can fit quite a few shirts on that same on-the-wall rail using a normal coathanger with a rotating head. Not that this isn't better, I'm just not sure it's "six bucks per hanger and using a normal rod instead of buying ours isn't recommended PS you can't use them for pants" better.
My biggest issue with coat hangers - including this one - is that they are all thin so forget putting heavier shirts, sweaters, and especially jackets on them - they'll stretch out part of the shoulder and you have this visible piece of material sticking out when you put it on.
I had a good friend who studied industrial design, and they told me that these kind of improvements are the most impressive. Fixing things we all use and didn’t realize needed fixing.
It bothers me so much that the initial prototype and final product and everything in between are largely the same. I feel like there's potential for some abstract thinking.
...that creases your clothes?
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.
I like it very much. The concept, how she communicates, and the fact that she solves her own problem first.
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.
I really wish she’d do a checkable garment bag. fingers crossed
This is great!! Good job Simone :)
Really great video... great job!!!
I'm baffled by the comments that are criticizing this because there are other solutions as if there is only one true solution to this problem.
I just love the maker's mind.
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..