441–450 of 456 posts
Hmm - does it not generate a crease down the middle of all of your shirts?
The fold as done here, without any external force, won't result in a crease
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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…
That's his point though. You can't patent "Claim 1: a folding coat hanger".
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…
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.
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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?”
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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…
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 i…
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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.
Gotta finance the past 3 years of living, and employees apparently, minus what she made in that time from other projects which she says was operating a loss (but could be marginally lossy who knows)
A lower price to get consumers to try them out and even replace a bunch of their existing hangers with folding ones could get her a lot more sales and let volume make up for smaller profits.
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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 worrie…
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 i…
Seriously, think about this next time the criticality levels hit too damn high. Folks can't deal with inequity easily these days, it seems .. its harder and harder to maintain an interest in others when so much depends on our own ability to be interesting ...
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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…
> 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.
FWIW, I've done some digging and at least it's not just a mafia shakedown (like the USB-IF charging thousands for an artificially scarce numeral).
The equipment and expertise are both expensive and time consuming. DIY is possible, but would cost considerably more.
I'm a little surprised I haven't heard about a single start-up accelerator that has cert gear available...
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Gotta finance the past 3 years of living, and employees apparently, minus what she made in that time from other projects which she says was operating a loss (but could be marginally lossy who knows)
She seems pretty confident that these hangers are a good idea. She could make up the costs of development over a longer period of time and still come out way ahead by the end. At $20 a hanger she risks turning a lot of people away. The kind of people who are really pressed for closet/clothes hanging space don't typically have $500+ to spend on hangers. A lower price to get consumers to try them out and even replace a…
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There are too few of them to justify the production run costs.
And yet, the Kickstarter has achieved triple their goal already.