Recently, I was interviewed by Jeff St. Clair of WKSU NPR about what led me to disrupt zippers: Young Cleveland Entrepreneur Looks to Undo the Zipper Industry.

It all started with my rabbit eating the zipper on my laptop case.

 

I seek to disrupt zippers where others have merely iterated and innovated.

Iteration: making an old product better

Innovation: making a completely new product

Disruption: making a new product that’s better than the old product such that the old product is rendered obsolete

 

Ever since zippers for clothing were invented, they’ve simply been iterated upon. Every year, there are hundreds of zipper patents filed that revise the zipper.
What started out as individual clasps interlocking over 165 years ago has resulted in…individual interlocking teeth.

 

The only zipper innovation in history was, until now, the packaging style “push to close” zipper commonly referred to as a Ziploc (TM) closure. And, if you look at the IP history, you’ll see there are now hundreds of different ways to make an extruded “Ziploc(TM)-style” zipper.

Yet, these zippers have never been strong enough for durable goods because they don’t have a rigid component and so they couldn’t disrupt the clothing fastener.

 

As described in this post, Elias Howe invented the first zipper in 1851 and ever since then zippers for clothing have been comprised of tiny interlocking parts whether clasps, hooks, teeth, scoops, or loops. In 1893, the zipper was updated by Whitcomb L. Judson. And, in 1913, Gideon Sundback further enhanced the zipper.

 

The Department of Defense has been looking for a better chem/bio protective suit and shelter closure since the 1960s. They’ve tried nearly every closure ever in existence in history…except my closure, ironically. More about that in this blog post: Zipr Shift’s SBIR Challenges.

FEASIBILITY AND DESIGN STUDY FOR COLLECTIVE PROTECTION EQUIPMENT FOR THE AN/MSG-4 SYSTEM (1961)

Evaluation of Fasteners for Flexible Shelter Applications (1975)

A Test Unit for Evaluating the Mechanical Endurance of Slide Fasteners (Zippers) (1977)

 

Even the leading zipper manufacturer in the world spent over $78 Million last year (2015) on zipper R&D in order to produce better zippers.
Established companies led by adept sales and marketing teams will often iterate to improve a technology that’s flawed instead of thinking of a whole new solution.

Their focus is on improving the solution and not eliminating the problems of that solution. It takes less effort to tweak what’s already there than to do something completely different, and they’re comfortable at the top.

 

After trying my own tweaks like coating the zipper tape, I broke everything down to what a closure needs to be effective.

Principles of an effective closure:

• Rigidity and Hardness
  • This is the reason why the clothing zippers are so mechanically strong- the teeth and coils bear the stress of the closure and resist change in their shape and location.
  • But a totally rigid closure isn’t adaptable…
• Flexibility
  • Zippers have to get around small radius curves.
  • But this is the reason Ziploc(TM) -style closures are mechanically weak- the closure will bend and deform easily.
• Continuous Profile
  • For watertight and gas-tight features. No leaks = effective CLOSE-ure (closure)

Rigidity and flexibility definitely appeared to be conflicting goals.

But, I thought that if I could redirect the forces on the closure and segment the rigid components then I could achieve everything.

My logic…

 VS. 

A weak joint opens in the same force component that it is stressed in (current zipper). So that needed to be changed.
This is why my closure opens away from you and not towards your shoulders. It is opened in a different force component than it is stressed.
This redirection of applied forces makes all the difference in the closure’s strength.

I knew that somehow I had to combine the packaging zipper and the clothing zipper…

The above was my first attempt.

 

It worked great! It gave great tensile results because it had rigid parts (shown with the color gold.) It was also flexible due to having a flexible plastic or rubber exoskeleton (shown as the transparent white color) with rigid inserts. Even more, it was a watertight and gas-tight continuous profile.

It all looked great except this closure would have been prohibitively expensive to manufacture. The problem was the shape of the closure that dictated how it would have to be made.

 

So I had to keep thinking… But, I knew I was so close! This was the 8 months (not 18 months as said in the WKSU article, at 18 months the patents were already filed so I definitely hadn’t just thought of it at that point xD) point where I was ready to give up. I didn’t know how I’d make it cheaper.

 

One day, about four months later, I was getting into my car and a piece of trim was hanging off of it.

It looked like this.

I saw it and had a eureka moment! Metal inside rubber and plastic. Rigid and flexible and continuous. My subconscious knew this was it before I even felt the trim to push it back onto my car door!!

I had thus found the zipper tape shape solution in an 86 year old car and window sealing product called self-locking edge trim.

 

Why did no one else see this before?

Between the Department of Defense and YKK, thousands of PhDs, engineers, and scientists had been working on what amounts to a simple kinematics problem– the zipper fastener.

It’s such a simple problem that was convoluted and complicated by the “experts.” I simplified the problem and solved it in the way I described in this blog post..

 

And, ironically, the component of the zipper that I’ve incorporated to make the more durable zipper has existed since the 1930s: Patent US1919130 – Channel.

That means both YKK researchers and engineers and Dept. of Defense researchers and engineers could have figured this out once they began doing research.

But, they didn’t. They had at least 40 years to use it. They never saw it.

 

 

I found the zipper synergy in a year of independent research. More on that in this post.