When a product design asks for $7,000 on Kickstarter but nets $228,000, it's worthy of study, particularly when the design is not an obvious home run. Any product designer should be asking themselves: What is it that these guys tapped into, in the backers' consciousness, that made it such a hit?
First let's look at the product in question. The mininch Tool Pen is a hollow, magic-marker sized hexagonal rod that holds six driver bits, with the frontmost ready to use. It's essentially a bit-storing screwdriver in a more compact form, and with a pen-like cap to prevent the front bit from spearing the inside of your pocket or bag.
Here's why I would not have expected the design to be a hit:
- Suffers from same capacity problem as all bit-holding driver handles: Requires user to predict, in advance, which bits will be needed on the road - Loading/unloading bits is linear and time-consuming, i.e. if you want the bit located in the middle, you must cycle out each bit before it, reloading them in the rear as you go - Lack of proper handle precludes user ability to produce serious torque
For me, that last one is the most damning, probably because I'm projecting my own needs onto the thing; in my sideline work (fixing vintage sewing machines) I often need the leverage to remove fasteners welded on with fifty-year-old petrified grease. But in the minds of the backers—whose collective opinion is frankly more important than your correspondent's, as they actually have the power to bring this design to fruition—the mininch's benefits outweigh the minuses. These benefits are:
- Compact form more convenient to carry than a proper driver, meaning it can be with you at all times - Handsome sand-blasted aluminum housing - Windows milled into the side allow you to see which bits are within - Bits "are constructed from high-quality, milled SAE 8660" - Bit shape and number appear to be laser-etched onto the sides, which is more legible than the faint stamping you find on cheapie bits
Perhaps it's ultimately the video that sells it. It focuses not so much on close-ups of the product, but more on the lifestyle scenarios the mininch developers are promoting: A world where lots of little mechanical things go wrong, and the mininch's omnipresence means you're always able to fix them:
Feedback time—what do you use drivers for, and would you buy this? If not, what do you feel the product owes its runaway funding success to?
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.
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The Mininch Tool Pen: What Makes This Design Such a Funding Smash?
You say "There's no middle ground here? A tool is either supremely useful or utterly useless and making a mockery of your profession?"
I know you are being facetious, but actually, that pretty much sums up my view on tools. I have tools that are really well designed, and do what they were meant to do amazingly well, and then I have tools I regret having wasted money on. There really isn't much middle ground. I can't, ever once, remember saying to myself "wow, I'm so glad I bought that kind of ok tool, that sort of works moderately well, at tasks that I sometimes kinda do on rare occasions."
For me at least, tools are either incredibly good uses of money that make getting a job done much easier than it would otherwise be, or they are a mistake I never should have bought.
Here is the target audience, which now includes Core77?:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/002/388/974/9f9d84bde9edff579507664627aad912_large.jpg?1407237626
GQ-Brasil?
A hex-sided body is a lot easier to fit a vise grip or perhaps a box wrench onto.
[Sorry to be so critical] but many people (dare we say, especially those with a "lack of tool literacy"), will quickly perceive this over-designed tool-holder as a -- pocket panacea. It's not. It's more akin the latest update of the Ginsu Knife, Popeil Pocket Fisherman, etc., etc. Many will be bought with good intentions, or as gifts; but most will end up lost in kitchen drawers, or remaindered at garage sales. What a waste: ID in thrall to Sales.
[One more question: Just how many -- (note: Mininch-proprietary) bits -- does actually it take to screw in a bike?]
I'd rather have multiple screwdrivers with proper grip that aren't particularly fashion conscious than 1 fancy one which isn't practical. My advice is to bulk it up for 'man hands' to grip it properly.
It’s a easily available tool not a F1-pit tool. And there were only 6 bits inside the body.
Needs of extreme torque (which is not often), maybe attach a special sized wrench in the pack only for its hexagonal body will provide larger torque than any other conventional screwdrivers.
Lucky for them! It still looks good