Today, Inventables is a website where sign shops, model makers, engineers, artists, and designers come to buy materials in small quantities for their prototypes and small projects. Our online store features thousands of products ranging from Suction Cup Tape to Acrylic –but it didn’t start this way.
In February of 2002, Inventables was founded to help companies innovate. We set out to share our excitement for what technology makes possible with the world’s innovators.
Inventables began by interviewing 50 product developers with the intention of helping these people and their companies understand, and subsequently incorporate, innovative materials and technologies into their creative processes.
The goal of Inventables is to bring innovation and inspiring ideas to every designer and engineer. We are driven by a perpetual curiosity about human psychology and the design process and by a desire to celebrate human achievement. Our intention was, and remains, to empower product developers with knowledge of what is new and possible. We hired 80 Technology Hunters to find this information by sharing knowledge with designers, scouring trade shows, reading trade journals and magazines, researching foreign markets, and talking with our network of “informants.”
In those days, our collection was curated by a small team in our office. The items we selected came from five categories: materials, mechanisms, electronics, processes, and “wow” products. Included items had to demonstrate something new, solve a problem in an unconventional way, or be found only in a niche market while remaining largely unknown elsewhere.
Thousands of designers in companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Motorola, and Black & Decker–in industries that include furniture, automotive, toys, sporting goods, and consumer electronics–are being inspired by Inventables. Products directly influenced by Inventables have emerged on store shelves. The Innovation Center has become an important resource for creative teams in some very large companies. It was exciting to see real products materialize from our work, but we felt the pace needed to increase if we were going to achieve or vision.
Motivated by the desire to push innovation forward even faster, we opened up our once proprietary research for free to the world. The Inventables Marketplace was born. By making access free, we are democratizing the researching and sourcing of new materials. Information and access to new materials that was once only available to the largest companies in the world is now available to anyone with an internet connection.
In 2010 we took that a step further and started working with vendors to figure out a way to offer their materials and technologies in small quantities. This has started to level the playing field between “Little R&D” teams and major corporations that have deep budgets and long term supplier relationships. We’re working on removing additional barriers to innovation and product development over the next few years so stay tuned.