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INNOVATION RESOURCES

Spiral Eye Needle

Breakthrough:
Reinvention of the sewing needle that makes threading a piece of cake.

Inventor:
Pam Turner, United States

Financial reward:
$250,000

The Story:
Spiral Eye Needle

Unless you posses the nimblest of fingers and sharpest of eyes threading a needle is a task guaranteed to frustrate and tie you in knots. The apparently simple procedure of putting a piece of thread through a tiny hole can be anything but, and it becomes more difficult the older you get.

Pam Turner’s Spiral Eye Needles remove all the bother. A user slides a looped thread along the needle toward the eye where it engages in a groove and in a simple maneuver is pulled through. Then you’re good to go. So no more swearing, stomping, weeping, wailing or gnashing of teeth.

The idea had been germinating for a number of years, “I think it’s because my mum died and I felt bad that one of my last memories is of laughing at her when she couldn’t thread a needle," said the inventor.

And then a few years ago Turner started to experience similar problems and realized that it’s not the person sewing who is at fault, but the needle itself that is all wrong. “It made me angry and that is what got me through this whole thing. Once I got angry I wasn’t going to let it go.”

Courage

Thinking that someone must have invented a better needle Turner went out to the shops to look for it. She found an open eye needle, and whilst it made threading easy, the thread would come out when she used it. So she tossed it in the trash can and decided to invent a better one, embarking on a steep learning curve as she had no prior experience of metallurgy or manufacturing.

It was a process that involved courage, perseverance and considerable financial hits.

Her first step was to find out how to go about making a needle, but discovered it to be a secretive process. “They don’t make them in the U.S. anymore so I couldn’t just find a U.S. manufacturer to make them for me. So I approached manufacturers that made English needles and they told me that no one needs an easy thread needle."

Determination

But she wasn’t to be deterred. Turner looked through the Yellow Pages and searched the Internet trying to find people to help her. She spoke to metallurgists and anyone else she could think of, with each call adding to her body of knowledge.

“So I’d call up a metallurgist and say ‘I need a metal that can do this’ and he’d say 'well you need precipitating something or other’, and I’d ask if he had any and he’d say ‘no, but you should call this number’. And I just made phone call after phone call and every time I called I would learn another jargon word and by the end of a few months I sounded pretty smart.”

Turner also visited a number of different hardware stores to look at gadgets and lathes and would explain to customers what she wanted to do. They advised her on the tools she would need.

Prototyping

After constructing a few prototypes she found a prototyping company who looked at her design and then took an existing needle, cut off the top part and cut in the eye shape. This is where she learnt about metals. “Once the needle has already been tempered it breaks, and so while the design worked, it wouldn’t work using existing needles and so that was the start of the hunt for the metal.”

Turner had a very clear idea about the type of metal she wanted. It had to have magnetic properties so that if a needle is dropped it can be easily picked up. “And I knew that it had to be something that didn’t rust, and I didn’t want something with nickel plating because nickel allergies are such a problem for women.” By a process of elimination a particular type of surgical steel was found.

Steep Hurdles

In October 2007 Turner quit her job to sell the needles and reserved spaces at state fairs and expos. She was expecting delivery of 30,000 needles but at the last minute the company making them informed her they had only produced 200, and not only that they were of the wrong design. If she wanted more she would have to pay them $50,000. “I wasn’t going to pay for something that I didn’t want and so I had to start the whole process all over.”

She took the 200 needles and doctored them the best she could and put them on a stand at a trade fair. They were an immediate hit and therefore she knew there was a market for her invention.

Made in the USA

Turner was keen to use a U.S. based manufacturer. Growing up in Michigan, a state that had once derived much of its income from the automotive industry, she witnessed a decline in its fortunes when manufacturing went elsewhere.

“How long can countries, not just the U.S, survive if all you are is a consumer country? What are we going to make if we have all of our things made in Japan, China, Taiwan and India? So to me it was a statement, we need to keep things local. It was very important to me.”

She eventually found a local manufacturer and sat down in a meeting with the owner and his son. All seemed to be going well until she informed them that she had run out of money and couldn’t pay anything until production. “They looked at each other, and I thought uh-oh I’ve just lost this, but then the wife of the owner came into the room and picked up a needle and said ‘oh my God I need one,’ and that was it."

Financial Strain

One of the biggest challenges for Turner has been finding the finances. “It’s financially exhausting. I got to the point where I really was thinking of quitting, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I had negotiations with a needle company that fell apart, I was four months behind on all my house payments and expenses, and it was absolutely beyond what I could handle. So I was thinking I would have to get a real job, but as soon as I did I knew this would be put on the back burner and it just wouldn’t happen.”

But then a lucky break; the U.S. patent office wrote an article about her invention and published it on the Internet. It went viral and sales have been soaring ever since.

Healthy Sales

So far 50,000 needles have been sold at an average cost of $5 each, but after five years Turner is still in the black because of the research, marketing and other costs. But she has just signed a deal with a company who will sell them on television, and is working on a contract with another distributor who will put her innovation in all the mom and pop stores in the world. “With these contracts I should be able to be very comfortable.”

Tens of millions of needles are made every single week and so the potential market is enormous.

Valuable Lesson

Turner’s story and her frustration at trying to make traditional needles perform better has an important lesson for other inventors. She believes we are too ready to accept the faults of too many products, and rather than address those faults inventors come up with fixes instead. “Inventors need to stop and say ‘wait a minute, why are we making all these gadgets to make something function better? Maybe it’s the thing itself that needs to be fixed.’ So we need to look at the beginning of where the problem is.”

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