I spent 3 years working on a coat hanger [video]

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:

https://shop.invisible-computers.com

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.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

> 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?

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?

Cue the low-quality foreign made knock off branded as “Amazon’s Choice” in 3… 2…

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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...")

> 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).

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.

> ”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.

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

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.

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.

This won't crumple anything other than the most rigid/starchy of clothes.

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...

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.

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.

Much goofier looking though.

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.

Kevin Scott (the CTO of Microsoft) interviewed her in an episode of his podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/simone-giertz-inventor...

This is where I discovered her:

https://youtu.be/M1B3gATS0GE

(voice of machine by Adam Savage)

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.

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.

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.

Where is the COGS mentioned?

StuffMadeHere (https://www.youtube.com/@StuffMadeHere) is one of my favorites in this regard.

She has a video on that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inVvXS6gA8c

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.

Falling hazard.

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.

She has a fake car commercial video for it as well, that is just top tier parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R35gWBtLCYg

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.

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.

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

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 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:

https://www.wikihow.com/Hang-Pants

I think pants would work, if you put them in legs first.

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.

> 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.

Twist the hook 45 degrees. Save square root of whatever the coat hanger width is. There's some wasted space in corners though.

I like this simple solution, but it makes it difficult to see all your clothes and which article you want.

RVs frequently have closets where this is a problem. I ended up buying tiny hangers, but would rather have had this.

They are the ones being right. The real value is in MAKING/building those things. Not paying someone in perpetuity because they had a good idea once. Our system is completely corrupt and promotes exploitation of labor for the gains of a few peoples. It is absurd that we agree to pay some people ad vitam æternam just because they did decent work once. By the same standard, a manual worker achieving outstanding work that allows some project to work and meet expectations should be covered for life. But instead, he gets a tap on the back the "right" to go back and continue hard labor.

This is exactly how Apple got so rich. They "invent" and design hardware/software using a minimal amount of privileged well paid peoples and then go on and exploit cheap labor in a faraway country in order to sell the device with insane markup in their own county, very often to peoples who could have very much used a well-paid labor job.

China is making very clear an obvious fact: ideas, designs, concepts, and immaterial things like that only have value when they can be shared and executed upon. Making is where most of the valuable creation happens. Apple would be making zero dollar is it was only an idea of a device and not the actual very well-built device, enabled by China's workers...

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.

Well, wide-spread copying might be 'sadly' for her, but it would be good for consumers.

> accessibility being invention's other mother

Nice quote, have to remember.

The rail is part of the Kickstarter

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 :)

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.

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

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.

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.

p sure it's a noncancerous tumor, but she hasn't discussed it much (if at all)

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?

> No one else is mentioned in doing any of the work.

She mentions two people by name in the video

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.

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.

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 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!)

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.

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.

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.

She did address it by browsing quickly through a Google Images page, which indicates what kind of solutions she encountered.

Nevertheless, fair question.

I hate these kind of hangers.... my shirts get stuck in the "grooves" when I try to take them off

oh my god you solved the problem, quick make a yt and kickstarter

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.

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.

how thick would they need to be

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

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'm having a hard time imagining this. How would you get it to lie flush against the wall?

When I saw this video earlier this was my immediate thought as well. Would've helped with closets in our old apartment so much.

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.

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.

These are neat, but solve a different problem than the hangers from the submission.

Why not?

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.

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.

The owls are not what they seem

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.

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.

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.