Back to the Ironing Board

When Isaac Newton nailed his theory of gravitation, I have little doubt that he was in one of three places: on the toilet, in the bath, or behind an ironing board. I like to think it was the board, for there is no greater hotspot for big ideas. For me, the mark of a genius is not the Nobel Prize in your sock drawer, but your ability to solve the Times crossword before pressing your third hankie.

I have hatched as many as five grand plans whilst scorching my shirts, yet few come into fruition. This, as you are about to discover, is a very good thing. What follows are two mad business ideas I dreamt up, pursued for a while, and promptly abandoned. I share them because I believe that airing your failures is more important than polishing your trophy cabinet.

eWoks: cookware for the Star Wars generation

Who said that selling cookware couldn’t be an adorable business venture? My plan involved selling quality woks online by drop shipping them from a German manufacturer. I had drafted the identity and mapped out the logistics when I approached a solicitor to check some minor points:

‘You’d get away with calling it eWoks so long as you avoid any mention of Star Wars,’ he said. ‘But that packaging with the furry ears is pushing your luck.’

I’d spent two weeks in fits of giggles designing the packaging. On top of a plasticard hoop that surrounded each wok, two ears would be punch cut, scored, and folded to stand up. Each ear would be covered with a furry slip. Were I to pitch my eWoks to a department store, they would stand out on the shelves as an army of delightful creatures appealing to be carried home.

Hearing that my design might land me in hot water, I did what any self-respecting entrepreneur would do: I approached a sexy London packaging firm to produce a prototype. They, too, thought the concept both charming and ridiculous, and were happy to provide me with an estimate to produce my idea in bulk. Sadly, the cost of my furry wraps would be three times the price of the woks themselves. I was devastated.

One week later, I was losing sleep over the legal issues again. I dreamt that George Lucas, on a visit to the UK, had walked into Selfridges to buy an onion¹ only to see 40 of my eWoks on a stand, each one pleading with him not to overreact. He’d taken out a mobile phone and made two calls: first to his legal team and then to a Jedi Knight, whose instructions were to ‘make it look like a nasty accident with a Wii remote’. This was the wake up call I needed.

I considered other branding ideas², but wasn’t willing to drop the eWoks name or license it from George and his onion — it would have taken the fun out of the whole thing for me — and I reluctantly abandoned my dream of making gimmicky cookware for good.

NaviCart: GPS for shopping trolleys

Ever spent 30 minutes in a new supermarket trying to find maple syrup? You’re not alone. I thought that bringing turn-by-turn navigation to the shopping trolley was a great idea, but not everyone shared my enthusiasm.

‘How would it make money?’ said one family member I entrusted the concept to.

My thinking was that supermarkets would pay me to fit customised GPS units to a percentage of their trolleys, collect the data in a central command unit, and help to rearrange their stores to make more sales, all while enabling customers to find that elusive ingredient.

The idea began to droop when I discovered that global positioning technology is accurate to within 15 metres or so, and that it rarely works indoors. Telling people they’re between six and 40 aisles from the chocolate ice cream doesn’t hold much appeal. What’s more, it occured to me that the wobbly wheel effect might produce plotted journey data that looked like a minor earth tremor at a Spirograph convention.

Confident I could overcome these tiny flaws, I contacted a senior manager at a British supermarket chain, whose attention I secured by telling his assistant that I’d discovered a major bug in their online grocery site that had allowed me to order 12,000 pork pies without paying for them.³ To my delight, I was put through straight away.

The store manager pointed out that attaching expensive GPS devices to shopping trolleys — which he cruelly dubbed ‘getaway vehicles’ — represented a considerable security risk, and that his customers, loyal patrons all, would swipe the lot before lunchtime. I countered that when they inevitably did, at least we would know where they’d taken them.

In reference to my suggestion that he might improve sales by better understanding his customers’ habits, he said that they employ discreet teams of undercover people watchers whose job it is to determine how customers move through the store; they also do things like timing purchase decisions with a stopwatch, he boasted. I found the news creepy,⁴ but commended him for going to great lengths to collect data at the expense of a little thing like his customers’ rights to privacy, and that — for this reason alone — my NaviCarts might be right up his aisle.

Finally, I mentioned that my turn-by-turn trolleys would be a useful service for his customers. He countered that every one of his ‘team members’ are trained to know the location of all items in his store. He recommended I stopped to ask one of them so I could see how helpful they were. ‘Try something obscure,’ he said. ‘You’ll be surprised.’ The following weekend, I did just that.

‘Excuse me,’ I began. ‘Could you direct me to your y-shaped coaxial splitters?’ To my horror, the reply came back without so much as a puzzled look:

‘Follow me!’ said a helpful team member, who ended each sentence with an exclamation mark. ‘They’re in aisle three! Opposite the sat navs!’

I’ve abandoned close to a hundred concepts like these. My advice to anyone who’s full of ideas is to keep having them, exploring them, and going back to the ironing board when you must. But, for goodness sakes, be sure to follow through with one or two. Someone out there’s mad enough to buy into your daft idea: water wings for poorly ducks, perhaps, or — might I suggest — an ironing board with an area for notes.