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INNOVATION RESOURCES

Straight Up - Beautiful Vending Styler Machine

Breakthrough:
A revolutionary coin-operated hair straightening machine.

Inventor:
Andrew Mackay and Richard Starrett, United Kingdom

Financial reward:
$500,000+

The Story:
Straight Up - Beautiful Vending Styler Machine

“Girls would walk into the toilets and scream and shout and get excited. Exactly the sort of reaction we thought it would be.”

There aren’t many inventions that would elicit that kind of response but according to Neil Mackay, co-creator of the award-winning Straight Up Hair Straightening Vending Machine that’s exactly how it’s been received by fashion conscious females.

The invention does what it says on the tin - straightens fizzy and hard to fix hair. It is a lifeline for the many women who have problems maintaining their hairstyles during party nights or rainy shopping days. Users just deposit a few coins and once the machine heats up it provides more than a minute’s worth of power to straighten strands and fix frizzes.

Generating Ideas

Mackay and his business partner Richard Starrett have been working together since they were 18 year old students at Strathclyde University in Scotland, and often come up with ideas for innovations and businesses.

They have a history in the nightclub industry and understand what makes nightclub people tick. They started to play around with a few ideas which led them to ask the question “what do women really want?” They told themselves that whatever the answer it would have to involve no staff costs. This led them to come up with an automatic hair straightening machine as they realized that hair straighteners were the only part of a woman’s beauty regime that she didn’t carry round with her in a handbag.

The business duo sketched out a few ideas and plans and ploughed £100,000 (approx USD $150,000) of their own money into the venture as they began to source components. They approached intellectual property lawyers and applied for a UK-wide patent. This was soon upgraded to a PTC (international patent).

But it wasn’t a straightforward trajectory from the sketch pad to fully functioning machine.

“There were lots of technical issues, but that’s the value of trial and error,” Mackay adds. "Once we got our first machines we realized there were all sorts of things that were wrong, such as not accepting the size of coins, and the time offered. There were also a few teething problems getting to the right shape, size and look.”

Mackay and Starrett were small scale at first and built and tested just a handful of machines. This small production run meant they didn't expose themselves to too much financial risk if the innovation had failed.

No More Bad Hair Days

Once the problems were straightened out, it was off to the marketplace with their innovation.

“We put the machines together ourselves, we knocked up the marketing materials ourselves, we sold them ourselves, we put them on the walls, and we collected the coins in the first instance. And then we realized we were onto something and expanded thereafter.”

The entire process from concept to purchasable product was achieved at breakneck speed, taking just six months.

“Oh we didn’t muck around. It was one of those moments where we had been toying with a lot of ideas, but when this idea sunk in it was very immediate. We didn’t have to speak to too many people to realize the reaction it was going to get.”

Since its launch in April 2005 the hair straightening machine has taken on a life of its own. The original intention was just to place them in nightclubs and bars, but there have been a raft of orders from offices, shopping malls, train stations and airports. From a small test market in Scotland the product spread UK-wide and Mackay and Starrett's company Beautiful Vending has sold around 1,000 units in this market alone.

They also now supply machines for rental or sale to 23 countries, and the Beautiful Vending name is becoming a widely recognized brand that they hope to build on with new ideas and concepts.

[NEXT STORY]Article by: Paul Arnold

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