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Crowdfunding Smash: An Overly Designey, Minimalist Hot Glue Gun That Takes Proprietary Glue Sticks

The final funding figure looks fishy

By Rain Noe - December 7, 2020

As an industrial design student years ago, I'd never have guessed that our basic studio tools--rulers, circle templates, glue guns--would one day be remade as expensive, overly designey "luxury" items. But it's happened. There's that fancy $84 Stria folding ruler, the $120 Iris circle drawing object...

....and now it's the humble glue gun's turn. This "Imezing: World's Most Compact & Powerful Cordless Hot Glue Pen" looks like it was designed purely to win a 1990s German design award.

The $39 object doesn't take standard 1/2" glue sticks, nor even the smaller 7mm x 100mm sticks available on the market; instead it takes a proprietary 7mm x 25mm size that you load into a chamber like bullets in a rifle. So unless you want to order replacement glue sticks from Imezing, "you may simply cut [market-standard 7mm sticks] away to use with the Imezing," according to the company.

Super helpful call-out

This illustration says "We're not quite sure how to use call-outs (and we don't proofread)"

Looking at the usage cases, I'm not sure who this is designed for:

Enter a caption (optional)

Nevertheless, the Imezing was crowdfunded in 30 minutes, and wound up with $167,020 on IndieGogo and $166,313 on Kickstarter, according to each of the campaign pages--but something seems weirdly fishy here: Add those two numbers together, and you get $333,333. WTF?

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Crowdfunding Smash: An Overly Designey, Minimalist Hot Glue Gun That Takes Proprietary Glue Sticks

Frank Borsboom

2 months ago

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2Z

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at least it's got USB c....

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Juan Cano

2 months ago

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2Z

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That's crazy. How long is a glue stick that size is going to last? 2 minutes? Biggest hassle is changing stick, this design essentially caps the length of the stick.

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Anders Hansen

2 months ago

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This is really the dark side of design and our consumption society. it's like they've read a book about Dieter Rams in a language they don't understand: It's all style, no substance.

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Zach Wheeler

2 months ago

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So if this product fails and it never actually gets produced, do they just get to keep the $333,000 dollars?

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Rain Noe

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.