Those familiar with the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang will recall that its main character is a struggling inventor who eventually strikes gold with a flying car.
Invention is tough, even with big money behind it – think the Dyson vacuum cleaner and the Sinclair C5 battery car – but that hasn’t deterred Patricia Mangan, who already has one product selling internationally and is close to finalising a second, the Orbysun hybrid clothes dryer, which addresses the perennial problem of getting laundry dry whatever the weather.
Mangan has sketchbooks full of ideas and never leaves home without a drawing pad in her bag. “Ideas can be fleeting so you need to get them down in the moment,” she says.
By day, Mangan works as an architect designing one-off houses that have minimal impact on the environment. By night she invents, with many of her ideas sparked by her passion for interior design and her frustration at seeing beautiful homes ruined by essential but ugly-looking pieces of household equipment.
“I am passionate about problem solving and design and, ultimately, making life better for people,” she says. “It is a privilege to design a home for someone but product design is design on a different scale. I love putting my energy into creating something that responds to a need, adds value, has mass appeal and is aesthetically pleasing.”
A case in point was the traditional baby gate, which Mangan felt looked out of place in sleek modern settings. Her response was to design a minimalist alternative, which is now sold worldwide under several brand names including Fred in Ireland.
“I had various product ideas in my head, including the baby gate, and spoke to a friend from college, Declan Kinahan, who really knows about product,” says Mangan. “He suggested starting with the gate so I went to a trade fair in Germany to see if there was anything else like it on the market. On returning home, I further developed the design and engaged a patent attorney to apply for IP on the product.”
On a subsequent trip to a trade fair in Hong Kong, Mangan presented her design to the family behind the long-established Danish childhood safety products company Safe Care Co. Impressed by her idea, they struck a licensing deal. However, it still took another two years for the gate to go into production.
“The cost of developing the gate was a lot of time, and paying for IP and patent protection,” says Mangan. “I was lucky to get the licensing agreement but there was an awful lot of hard work and risk-taking behind it, especially as at that time I was a single mum with three kids and an architect with a small practice in the midst of a recession.”
Brand new products are not easy to launch because you’ve got to educate as well as sell the idea even if your product is a big improvement on what’s already out there
Mangan studied architecture at Bolton Street, graduating in the late 1980s when times were tough. She and most of her classmates had to emigrate to find work. She started her career in London with Max Hutchinson & Partners before joining the practice of celebrated French architect, Jean Nouvel, in Paris.
She set up her own practice, Studio M, in Dublin towards the end of the 1990s and established Maikology with Kinahan in 2017 to commercialise her inventions.
“I have good ideas for products, but I’m not a maker so I hire the best experts I can find across design, engineering, prototyping and intellectual property to bring the idea to life,” says Mangan, who is now looking for a manufacturing partner with an interest in sustainability to make the Orbysun dryer.
“Drying clothes on radiators or draping them on a clothes horses indoors is unsatisfactory for aesthetic and practical reasons and, for every load of washing dried passively on radiators, two litres of moisture are released into the home causing condensation and mould, which can increase the risk of asthma and eczema,” says Mangan.
“The alternative is tumble dryers, which have high running costs and high levels of carbon dioxide. Drying clothes outside is preferable but you have to contend with rain, pollen and pollution while, in hot climates, clothes won’t dry in high humidity and there are issues of sand and dust.”
Her solution is a hybrid dryer that runs on solar or conventional power. It looks like a tall suitcase and, if used outdoors, the clothes are protected from the elements as the unit is enclosed. “The idea was a slow burn, probably inspired by running out to the line every time it rained during my childhood in Mayo,” she says. “What I was aiming for was minimum surface area with maximum drying volume.”
Mangan estimates investment in the Orbysun so far to be about €350,000 in cash and an unquantifiable amount of sweat equity. The unit passed its testing phase with flying colours. However, just as the process of finding a manufacturer was ramping up, Covid threw a spanner in the works and stalled potential manufacturers’ appetite for risk.
“You need to be a little bit crazy to get into inventing,” says Mangan. “It requires a great deal of belief in what you’re doing and you’re living in anticipation of eventually getting paid.
“Brand new products are not easy to launch because you’ve got to educate as well as sell the idea even if your product is a big improvement on what’s already out there.”
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