Inventor’s device helps you get your game on . . . your phone

Working with inventors is common in the rapid prototyping business, with a lot of success stories out there. This latest one will make gamers sit up and take notice.

When inventor Hyrum Fairbanks came to Quickparts with a new product for his company Game Gripper LLC, he needed a mold fast. He’d just completed an idea for a new product and wanted to get it to market quickly.

Called the Game Gripper, the handheld device converts the Motorola Droid cell phone into a gaming handset. It fits over the keyboard and comes with custom buttons that align with it.

Game Gripper makes playing games on the Motorola Droid a lot easier.

Like most inventors who come up with a successful product, Fairbanks spotted a need in the market when he found the Droid keyboard clumsy for gaming. So he carved a plastic cutting board and some little wooden pegs into the initial shape of his product to create a prototype.

Plastics is outside Fairbanks’ area of expertise, so manufacturing the plastic parts needed for the Game Gripper was something he accomplished through research and educating himself, and a lot of DIY. Being an engineer by trade helped. He purchased a CAD software package and designed the button mold. First Cut, a rapid prototyping company in Maple Plain, MN, built the mold for him. Next, Fairbanks purchased a tabletop injection molding machine on eBay and ran the buttons in his garage.

What he needed next was a way to produce the Game Gripper economically. Research led him to Quickparts (Atlanta, GA) to make molds quickly, explains Patrick Hunter, VP sales and marketing for Quickparts. “The Game Gripper can mimic the Nintendo joystick, so as you’re holding your phone, it’s like holding the controller from Nintendo,” says Hunter. “It’s so simple and so clever. Rarely do we get inventors who are this successful and have their invention tied into a big-name product.”

A few weeks later, he had 100 Game Grippers in hand, ready to sell. Fairbanks went live on his website, as well as a few other sites that specialize in gaming gadgets. The next morning orders began pouring in. By afternoon, Fairbanks’ wife, Brie, called to tell him she was being overwhelmed by orders for the Game Gripper. He sold all 100 in a day.

“We had 400 orders the first day, so we had to put 300 on backorder until we got our next shipment,” says Fairbanks. “It was a lot of work to get those out, and we ended up shipping a total of 800 units with our first effort.”

There were a few glitches along the way. The first button mold left a gate vestige on the end of the button when it was removed from the runner. Afraid the vestige would damage the phone’s keypad, they used emery boards to file down the gate vestige on more than 1000 buttons.

During the early days of manufacturing, Fairbanks hired two people to make the buttons in their garage, with shipping and receiving in the basement. Meanwhile, Fairbanks worked on three more models to fit other phone types.
 
Today, the buttons are molded from a new mold built by Design-Tek Tool & Plastics, and molding is done at Design-Tek’s custom molding facility in West Jordan, UT. Quickparts continues to supply the TPE covers, and shipping is done by Prostar fulfillment.
At press time, Fairbanks had sold more than 3000 Game Grippers, “one at a time,” he notes. “The designing and manufacturing was fun and easy—the hard part is selling them,” says Fairbanks. “We’re selling them on our website, which I put together myself, and I have a few ads in gaming product venues.”

Most inventors dream of selling millions of their products, but mass merchandising is tough, as Fairbanks found out. “Retail has been impossible,” Fairbanks states. “I’ve contacted everyone I could find and no one will put them on the shelf.  I even spent a whole day driving around Salt Lake City to different stores, and no one would even talk to me. But it sells itself, and I guess that’s one of the secrets to being a successful inventor.” —Clare Goldsberry