Nobbits Produces Shoelaces that Refuse to Come Undone: The Trend Setting — and Practical — Shoelace

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From above left to right: Nobbits shoelaces come in all sorts of stylish color combinations; Nobbits principals Dr. Jerlando F L Jackson, Chief Brand Officer and Co-Founder (l-r), Amos Anderson, Chief Executive Officer and Co- Founder and Ron Brent, President and Co-Founder Not pictured: Justin Hajny, Chief Financial Officer and Co-Founder; (Left) Nobbits ready for retail sales

 

 

Parents who were with their children couldn’t help but notice and asked where they could get some. Koblintz and Brent decided to make a couple of hundred of the shoe laces by hand. And they ended up getting invited to an apparel show for athletes in Chicago.

Part 1 of 2

By Jonathan Gramling

There are times when a dream deferred — temporarily — ends up being the best path forward.

Ron Brent a publisher who had once been a practicing engineer working under a nuclear engineer by the name of Tom Koblintz. Koblintz called Brent down to Rockford to help him with something. And what do engineers do when they get together? They create things and solve problems.

“Koblintz just loved playing with his grandson,” Brent recalled. “He was 72-years-old at the time. His grandson just kept saying, ‘Grandpa, tie my shoe. Tie my shoe Grandpa.’ Grandpa finally got tired of it and said, ‘I think he’s just doing it on purpose.’ He called me and said he was going to play a joke on him and he wanted me to help him. And so we went through this whole little thing. I came down to Rockford and he actually had his board set up. I used to work for him as a practicing engineer. We went in and he created this lace and then we put dots on it so that when you actually tie this lace, he figured that if you tied it and these little knots got intertwined with each other, it wouldn’t come apart. We did it. And a long story short, it worked to our amazement. It was funny. He couldn’t get them undone.”

 

 

“We did it because we figured we would see Michael Jordan and all the athletes,” Brent said. “It was much bigger than that because once we got there, Nike offered us a contract. They basically wanted the whole thing. They said, ‘We’ll give you a contract, but we want per diem, the whole thing.” Adidas wanted it. We figured that it was a good product. ‘Let’s just sit on it for a minute to figure out what to do.’ We did. A couple of weeks later, we got another deal from a company out of Japan. They wanted 250,000 pairs. We actually got ourselves into a pickle early. And to get out of the pickle, we tried to find a manufacturer. We did it backwards. We sold first and then we decided to manufacture. That’s not the way to do it."

While they had tapped into a market and had instantly acquired large sales orders, they didn’t know how to mass produce the shoelaces.

“We basically called all of the customers at that time and said, ‘Look we’re going to have to put this on hold until we find a way to manufacture this’ because we were doing them by hand,” Brent said. “We had a machine that engineers had created where you could do it by hand, slap it on and let it dry for 48 hours. We figured the best route to take was to put it to bed for a couple of years. Let’s see if we can figure out how to manufacture them.”

A couple of years turned into 17 years before Brent decided to give it a try and enlisted Amos Anderson, Dr. Jerlando Jackson and Justin Hajny to help him solve his production problems while also helping finance the company to take production to the next level. Nobbits, Inc. was formed.

“I looked all around the world trying to find engineers who could do it,” Brent said. “I couldn’t find anyone who could do it. And then I met Amos and I was telling him I was going to this appointment and that appointment and then I am done. I went out to see a company out in Verona, Big Sky Engineering. The guy was like, ‘We can do that.’ I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ Long story short, they started playing around with it and gave us a contract. We started from there. So we started with the machine itself out there at Big Sky Engineering. And we figured we would do the manufacturing because now we know there is only one machine in the whole world that can do this. And we owned it.”

Nobbits is located out in the Fitchburg Commercial Park. Their space will allow them to meet present and future demand. In the center of the production area stands the machine that works the Nobbits magic.

“The engineering company built the machine to our specifications,” Anderson said. “So it is our machine and our specs. The issue is the technology had changed drastically from that original concept to 2019. When 2019 happened, this guy indicated that they could perhaps build a machine. We talked to them about the specifications and what that needed to look like. And they did some drawings. Theoretically, they had it on paper and it looked pretty good. So we went forth with a contract with them to build a really unique, special machine where there would be only one like it in the world. However, during that time period, in March 2020, the pandemic happened. Everything got pushed back including the supply chain. We actually didn’t get our machine completed and have it installed until April 2021. We got the machine in and did some debugging and some training on it and actually started production of the laces to sell in July 2021.”

“From the time that the lace goes through the beginning of the machine and comes out on the end is a matter of 30-40 seconds and they are done,” Anderson said. “The lace has gone through, the nobs have been placed, the nobs have been cured and they come out on the back end ready for aglets to be put on and are then ready to be wrapped and packaged. It’s a huge difference.”

And what a difference a machine can make. 20 years ago, they could make roughly 25 by hand and had to wait 48 hours for the laces to dry completely.

“We can do anywhere — depending on the speed — 800 pairs of laces in four hours,” Anderson said. “The other thing is that not only is there more production, but there is also more consistency in terms of the laces drying and the curing of the laces and the sizes of the laces and the nobs on the laces. These laces are secured. Once you lace your shoe up and you get that custom fit to the comfort of your fit, it will not come undone.”

While the group had invested in Nobbits, they needed to raise outside capital, if you will, to fully become capable of mass producing the laces. They turned to Kickstarter.

“Kickstarter is an opportunity for you to presell your laces to get revenue that you can use towards some major investment you need to move your company to the next phase,” Jackson said. “In addition to the machine that needed to be made, we’ve got a couple of complimentary machines that are part of the full manufacturing process that Ron expressed earlier. We made our pitch to attract customers. It’s a pre-sell opportunity to raise income immediately and then you deliver the product much later.”

Learning from Brent’s early experience with marketing the product, Nobbits is producing within their means and not overselling their product. Their first order of business was fulfilling the orders generated by Kickstarter and some retail outlets. Eventually, Nobbits will be shooting for the moon.

Next issue: Expanding the market and beyond.

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