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Discover the Amazing Story of the Creative Card
Clips, a Failed Invention
The "Creative Card Clips” Children's Toy - Patent
No. D286,555
This is a story about my experiences with creating
a simple invention. A children's toy in this case, prototyping it,
patenting it, getting it manufactured, and attempting to market it. We
never actually sold enough product to turn a profit.
I was thinking about building "card houses" out of
playing cards. I thought "wouldn't it be great if there were some way
to build things out of playing cards so they would not collapse so
readily?". I went out to the garage and after looking around a bit at
all the crap on my work bench, I spied a piece of 3/8 inch diameter
plastic tubing. I cut off several 3/4 inch long pieces of the tubing,
and cut down into the end of the tubing with a razor blade, making four
slits about 1/4 inch deep in each end of the tubing spaced equally
around the openings.
I tried sliding playing cards into the slits. The
cards were held firmly. Hey this might work! By about 2:30 a.m. I had
a set of about 50 of these little pieces of tubing turned into “card
clips”.
The next day I gave the clips and a few decks of
cards to my kids, to see if the toy was "entertaining". I have four
children who at the time ranged in age from 6 to 13 years old. We spent
several hours playing with the cards and clips. We were having a great
time with them. I called a friend of mine who had two kids as well, and
of about the same age. I took the clips and cards over to his house and
we tried them on his kids. His kids became quite involved in creating
various items with the cards and clips.
Our kids were building quite a variety of things
with the cards and clips. They built guns (of course), castles, cars,
boats, planes, hats, necklaces, and all kinds of buildings. I built a
castle the kids could get inside of it was so big. It took about 20
decks of cards. I also build a robot 6 feet tall.
To get a ball park idea of what the clips might
cost we calculated what it would cost to produce the clips using
injection molding with a 20 cavity mold. We came up with a cost of
about $0.0125 per clip. (1-1/4 cents per clip). The tooling was about
$13,000.
Next we needed to decide how to package the
product. We looked into a variety of packaging alternatives such as
blister cards, pre-formed plastic packages, and plain old boxes. We went
with the blister cards. They were inexpensive and we could buy the
equipment to do it ourselves fairly cheap. We produced the art for the
blister cards and made up a catalog sheet.
We wanted to package the clips with a deck of
cards, but we found that the decks of cards were way more expensive than
the clips. We wanted to keep the retail price low, so we ended up
packaging together about 30 clips and a half deck of cards. You could
get just clips, or clips with a half deck of cards. I can't remember the
pricing details.
We went to our local patent attorney and had a
patent search performed. For the card clips we could not get a utility
patent as there was nothing new and novel about my clips...basically a
paper clip. We could however get a "design patent". You can tell a
design patent because it always starts with the letter D ahead of the
numerical digits. The patent number for the card clips is D286,555. A
design patent simply prevents others from making "exact duplicates".
They are easy to get around because if you change anything at all it
won't infringe on the original patents.
We figured we could sell the card clips to
distributors via trade shows. The shows didn't pan out for us though.
As soon as a rep found out we would not be doing national advertising he
would loose interest. Buyers pointed out to us that they had no "empty
shelves", and would have to eliminate some other item to include the
clips. We managed to sell a few thousand packages to Safeway and a
couple of catalogs. I imagine that if we had been persistent and
attended enough trade shows we may have been successful with the clips,
but fate had other plans for us.
A very wealthy acquaintance of my partners happened
to notice the clips in my partners office one day, and asked if he could
get involved. This individual was highly successful and was selling his
product nationwide as well as over seas. We said "yes you may get
involved". Duh Big mistake.
The individual gathered together his key personnel,
his best sales reps, his corporate controller, his advertising agency,
etc. and we formed a corporation. We put up all of the equipment,
tooling, and patent, and they put up the cash. It was decided to obtain
more professional packaging, and our wealthy individuals "team" would
sell it not only nationally, but plans were made for South America and
Mexico as well.
We were feeling pretty good. We developed
attractive packaging in cardboard boxes covered with photos of assembled
projects. We had packages of either red clips or yellow clips. A dozen
of the packages fit into a shipper. The shipper was designed to fold
into a point-of-purchase display case.
And then we waited. The first sign of trouble was
when only the wealthy individual put up any money. None of the others
could seem to get around to paying us for the stock.
To make a long story short, none of the "team" did
anything with regard to the clips. They were only involved because Mr.
wealthy individual was their biggest client or whatever. Even Mr.
wealthy grew bored and quickly lost interest, leaving my partner and I
with 100,000 packages of card clips, lots of debts, and no support, no
money for advertising, no salaries either.
Eventually the corporation declared bankruptcy.
The best laid plans of mice and men…
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