An earlier version converted 2,000lb of rubber as 91kg. I looked at the pictures and thought to myself: "Wow, that was started from our dining room table."ĭo you have an experience to share? Email article was amended on 29 September 2014. Seeing the royal family and Pope Francis wear the rainbow loom was unreal. Last year, we sold more than $40m worth of rubber-band bracelets. I had to hammer every single hook into shape, which took a whole year. Once, our supplier made a mistake and delivered 10,000 metal hooks that were all bent in the wrong shape. The journey has been magical, but there have been many challenges. I took a three-month sabbatical from Nissan, but never returned to my old job. After that, our sales climbed every month until, in December 2012, we reached $200,000 wholesale sales a month. The store owners told us they had never seen anything like it. When my wife and I saw it, our jaws dropped.
Less than two weeks later, the same store placed an order for $10,000. In July 2012, I received an order from a toy store in Alpharetta, Georgia, for 12 loom-band kits.
#Selling loom band bracelets how to#
So I asked my niece and my daughters to create YouTube videos, explaining how to make rubber-band bracelets. The problem was that people didn't understand how they worked. I spent months going round toy stores in Michigan with my daughters, trying to sell the loom band. We invested our entire family savings of $10,000 (£6,152) to order tooling and 2,000lb (907kg) of rubber bands from China, and assembled the kits ourselves in our garage. One day, I made a ring out of rubber bands and put it on her finger. I am the one in the family with all the crazy ideas, and she is my reality check. The biggest challenge was to convince my wife. I was still working full-time at Nissan, so I would stay up until three or four o'clock every morning. I spent six months developing the product and designed 28 different versions. It was my older daughter, Teresa, who first suggested selling them. Children would come up to me and ask me to make them bracelets. The next day, my daughters took a bunch of colourful bracelets to school. Then I started linking the bands in a zigzag, like a diamond shape, and it worked really well. I went down to my basement, grabbed a scrapboard and stuck multiple rows of pushpins into it. Maybe I can impress you girls." I sat down and showed them how to link the rubber bands together, using the same technique we had used to make jumping ropes back in Malaysia. One night after work, I saw them making bracelets from rubber bands and I thought, "Hey, I know how to do this. They were nine and 12, and distant towards me. I loved my job, but regretted not seeing my two daughters much. So I forged a career in crash safety in Detroit's motor industry. In 1997, the US economy was booming, and with a master's in mechanical engineering, it was easier to find a job in the US. I remember thinking: I am halfway round the globe if I scream, nobody will hear.Ī year after I graduated, the Asian economy crashed, and many of my friends back home lost their jobs. I had never seen snow before and barely spoke any English. My brother and I landed in Kansas on a snowy day in the spring of 1991.
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