Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2011. The ages and business details are as of 2011: Abbey Fleck aged 27 selling Makin’ Bacon at Wal-Mart for 10 dollars, KK Gregory aged 28 selling Wristies for 10 to 25 euros, and CJ running his own company.
It’s curious and striking that while we adults hunt for the business of the century, squeezing our brains to the limit and sometimes getting nowhere, a child can, on any ordinary morning, spot a need and turn it into one of the most profitable businesses. Here are five business ideas patented by ordinary children.
1. Makin’ Bacon
In 1991, an eight-year-old girl was making a typical American breakfast (bacon and eggs) with her father when she realised they had run out of napkins, so she had to use sheets of newspaper to put the bacon on. As everyone knows, paper contains petroleum, and mixing it with meat can’t be very healthy. So, at just eight years old, she started working with her father on a holder that would keep the bacon positioned so that the dripping fat didn’t mix with other food.
A business idea that borders on the absurd, but today its inventor, Abbey Fleck, now 27, runs her own company, which has got its Makin’ Bacon sold for 10 dollars at Wal-Mart, where the product sits right next to the appliance section.
2. Wristies (fingerless gloves)
In those cold winters when our hands freeze, we can wear gloves, but that doesn’t stop the cold from reaching our wrists and arms, especially if you plan to play in the snow. At the age of 10, KK Gregory invented Wristies: woollen gloves that reach halfway up the forearm and can also be worn with traditional gloves. That way your hands stay warm, and your wrists and arms stay warm and dry too. At 28, KK Gregory runs her own company, whose star product is Wristies, sold for between 10 and 25 euros in shops practically all over the world, as well as on her own website, Wristies.com.
3. Magnetic wallpaper for lockers and desks
Sarah Buckel had a problem at her high school: she cared a lot about how things looked. She disliked the lockers that American high schools have, which tend to be grey and cold-looking. Most students personalise them with posters in the form of stickers. The schools banned adhesives, because the lockers were left stained when the stickers were peeled off the following year.
Sarah Buckel knew she would have the same problem when she got to university and wanted to personalise her room and desk. As it happened, her father had just started working as CEO of a company that made magnetic cards, the kind you stick on the outside of the fridge, so she used the same system for magnetic decorative paper. That way you can decorate a locker and, the following year, take the paper off without any trouble and keep it, without leaving marks.
The product was so successful that it was extended to other products, such as magnetic decorations, magnetic mirrors, lamps and so on. They made so much money selling these products that they ended up buying the company where her father worked. Today, her products are in the biggest shops around the world. What’s more, if you own any product with a magnetic flap, you have probably generated income for Sarah Buckel, since she patented that idea.
4. Exercise videos for children
CJ, aged nine, was very interested in exercise infomercials. Every Saturday morning he would switch on the TV to watch anything related to exercise. The thing is, what he was watching wasn’t exercise for children but for adults. In the United States, childhood obesity is a problem, and this could be due to a lack of interest in exercise from an early age. Since there were no videos of this kind for children, CJ decided to make them himself.
The problem was that his family didn’t have the money to start the business, so once the first video was recorded, CJ and his father went looking for a company to handle mass production. Once they found one, the result was thousands of videos sold at 19.99 dollars each.
Today CJ runs his own company selling children’s exercise programmes and kids’ gym equipment.
5. The ice lolly stick
Never has there been an invention in which high technology played such an important role. We’re talking about the stick that holds an ice lolly :). This great invention was born in 1905 thanks to Frank Epperson, and it came about practically by accident. One night, 11-year-old Epperson was doing an experiment for a science class. He had a glass of water, cola and bicarbonate of soda and was stirring it with a plastic spoon. He left the glass on the windowsill on a winter night, and when he woke up the next morning he found a frozen mass stuck to the spoon. He pulled it out, tasted it and said: “This is better than ice cream.”
He began selling his own ice lollies at school and, seeing how popular they were, decided to patent the idea. The success of his idea is more than evident: if Steve Jobs changed technology, Epperson changed the way we eat ice lollies. Epperson sold the patent in 1923 to a large company. Nobody knows for how much, but it was enough that his descendants have no need to work.
The message is clear and simple. If children under 10 could come up with a great business idea, why can’t we?
Further reading
- 10 innovative and original products
- Business trends for 2012–2015
- Business idea: a military-style boot camp for weight loss
- Entrepreneurs: when plan B fails
Featured image: Willis Lam, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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