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.
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?
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.
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.
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?!" :)
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.
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 pedantry is just passive-aggressive hostility. There is a high jealousy avoidance factor in such responses - finding such an 'obvious' or 'easy' fault devalues the subject, so the jealousy fades away. "I have no need to respect/honor/be envious of this persons achievements because _insertSlightHere_ .."
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 ...
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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!
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.
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.
Many people back kickstarters to back the person, not the product, and Simone is well known and nice enough that I think that enough people would do that regardless of whether or not they needed these hangers.
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)
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 bunch of their existing hangers with folding ones could get her a lot more sales and let volume make up for smaller profits.
Agreed, that's the gamble one takes when deciding a price and generating hype from the start. I might also have put it lower, being rather cheapskate myself (or at least, not paying more than the absolute lowest price from the sustainable product options, which usually means... :( ).
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...