Is there anything more 2014 than Loom Bands? About half the people (grown ups) I'm in meetings with seem to wear them... They're everywhere.
An article in The Guardian at the weekend about Rainbow Loom inventor Cheong Choon Ng has this fascinating detail on the role YouTube played in the phenomenon (my bolding):
"We invested our entire family savings of $10,000 (£6,152) to order tooling and 2,000lb (91kg) of rubber bands from China, and assembled the kits ourselves in our garage. I spent months going round toy stores in Michigan with my daughters, trying to sell the loom band. Nobody was interested. The problem was that people didn't understand how they worked. So I asked my niece and my daughters to create YouTube videos, explaining how to make rubber-band bracelets. These created a trend.
In July 2012, I received an order from a toy store in Alpharetta, Georgia, for 12 loom-band kits. Less than two weeks later, the same store placed an order for $10,000. When my wife and I saw it, our jaws dropped. We thought it was a mistake. The store owners told us they had never seen anything like it. After that, our sales climbed every month until, in December 2012, we reached $200,000 wholesale sales a month. I took a three-month sabbatical from Nissan, but never returned to my old job."
I think that this is the original video:
