The invention of the Rainbow Loom is a story typical of successful entrepreneurs who just wanted to make something that worked and had no intention of creating a hugely successful product. The loom, which was initially called Twistz Bandz, is the brainchild of a Malaysian immigrant to the United States named Choon Ng who resides in the State of Michigan.
In 2011, Mr. Ng was looking for a way to show his daughters how to make bracelets out of rubber bands. The problem he faced was that his fingers were too big to manipulate rubber bands efficiently to make bracelets. He decided to put his engineering background to work (he was working as a crash-safety engineer for Nissan Motor Company) and constructed a crude loom device in his garage workshop that consisted of a single row of pushpins pressed into a block of wood.
His daughters were unimpressed with his first attempt at making rubber band bracelets with a loom because they could create the same bracelets by hand. Mr. Ng thought of a way to make the loom more useful and impressive by creating a loom with three rows of pushpins. He showed his daughters that by wrapping rubber bands around the three rows of pushpins in geometric patterns and then removing them from the loom, he was able to create more elaborate rubber band bracelets than they could create with their hands. At that moment, Mr. Ng realized that he had discovered a new craft device, but didn’t realize how big a success it would eventually become.
After making colorful bracelets for family and friends and being met with overwhelming approval, Mr. Ng’s oldest daughter suggested that he make a business out of his invention. Despite some reservations and financial challenges, Mr. Ng invested his family’s modest $10,000 nest egg into the creation of a business to build and market his rubber band loom invention. He continued to improve the loom and patented it, calling it the “Brunnian Link-Making Device and Kit”. He named it in honor of Hermann Brunn, a mathematician from the 19th-century who was the first to study convex geometry, which is the study of convex sets. Convex sets require every point on a straight line segment that joins them to also be within an object. In the context of the Rainbow Loom, it just means all of the rubber bands have to be within the loom, but they can be arranged in different ways to create different patterns.
Mr. Ng found little success in trying to sell his bracelet making loom kits through brick and mortar retail outlets at local shopping malls. Instead, he turned his attention to selling his bracelet making loom kits online by creating a YouTube channel that included a number of step-by-step tutorials that demonstrated how to use his device to make beautiful bracelets.
Mr. Ng’s success online was also limited, with monthly sales reaching $1,000 per month within a year of starting his YouTube channel. It was some nice extra money, but certainly not an income that he could support his family on.
He then had the good fortune of attracting the attention of the co-owner of two Learning Express store franchises in the suburbs of Atlanta, a woman named Cindy O’Hara. She ordered several of his bracelet making loom kits in the summer of 2012. O’Hara was able to sell the kits to young girls who visited her stores by demonstrating how to make colorful bracelets with them, and she soon placed another order for $10,000 worth of kits. The rest is history. The popularity of Mr. Ng’s bracelet making loom device kits spread throughout the Learning Express store network, and soon became a nationwide craze with many retailers offering Mr. Ng’s kits throughout the United States.
Mr. Ng is emblematic of someone who is living the “American Dream” of coming up with a good idea and putting the entrepreneurial spirit to work to turn his idea into a successful business.