RUBBER BANDITS

Adrian Chernoff created Rubber Bandits® — a rubber band with a tear-resistant label — as a product idea for an invention competition.

The competition was the first national search of its kind to find America’s next breakthrough office product. The nation-wide challenge was called Invention Quest™ and was created and hosted by Staples®, the office-supply chain retailer.

After being selected as one of the top ideas from a field of over 8,300 entries, getting through several rounds of competition, winning the online vote (from 147,000 ballots), and being chosen as a winner by a panel of judges including Art Fry (the inventor of the Post-It Note®), Adrian’s Rubber Bandit was selected by Staples founder and Chairman Tom Stemberg and his executive team to go into production and on to the store’s shelves.

How Rubber Bandits Were Invented:

The story began with a phone call and a challenge. Adrian’s mother had called him one evening and made him promise to enter the competition. As time was running out and the deadline was fast approaching, he knew he had to come up with something. But what?

All of a sudden, a light bulb went off in his head—that was it! Why not add a label to a rubber band? And that’s how Rubber Bandits was invented.

Beating the Competition: What made Adrian Chernoff different from his competitors was that he didn’t have an idea to invent when the competition was announced. Unbeknownst to Adrian, practically all of his competitors had had years to hone their ideas: they’d either filed for patents, been working on their ideas for years, or had translated their ideas into working and functional prototypes. Meanwhile, in comparison, Adrian began his project with a blank piece of paper. And yet—against the odds!—he won.

How Rubber Bandits Were Transformed into a Real Product:

After being selected from a field of over 8,300 entries, Adrian’s idea for Rubber Bandits was put into the top 100 round of the competition (the semi-finals). Once he knew he’d made it into the semi-finals, he only had six weeks to turn an idea from one that existed solely as a sketch on a piece of paper into one that was a real and functional product. But at least he already had a name for his product—that saved one step in the process.

A frantic dash ensued: late-night outings, making prototypes, and scouring through hardware depots, fabric stores, office-supply stores, and you-name-it stores. Then Adrian began the process of refining Rubber Bandits into reality. After hours upon hours of online materials research and testing a wide array of materials in real life, Adrian began trying to attach a label to a band. Some bands were inflexible; others were made of rubber. The difficult part was attaching things to rubber bands and getting them to stay in place and not tear off.

With the deadline fast approaching, Adrian starting riveting labels to rubber bands and made dummy packaging for the first real stage of the competition. He filled up a bag of items that were banded and labeled with Rubber Bandits, made a series of mock-up packages, and flew off to pitch his idea to the judges. He had a simple strategy: show the need, demonstrate the solution, and sell the idea.

It worked, and he won! …But it wasn’t over yet.

Semi-Final Judges for Staples Invention Quest

• Doug Melville, Designer and Partner with Design Innovation
• Beth Obermiller, VP of Product Development, Big Idea Group
• Kevin Thomas, Regional Vice President, Staples

In less than five weeks, Adrian had to make his idea real—rivets and fabric labels weren’t going to cut it. He searched high and low for suitable materials and finally found map-making material that could be glued onto itself.
The slow transformation from concept to product was beginning to happen! The only problem was that the labels were too flexible. Still, he felt he had a solid solution, so he started to engineer hundreds of prototypes, create a brand identity, and create packaging for this future product. In the final weeks, he even went so far as to make a one-minute movie sales pitch.

Tag Line: A rubber band with a label you can write on™

A week before he flew off again for the next round of the competition, Adrian finally found a material that could be written on and that worked better than the map material did. He’d taken a soft and flexible FedEx envelope and begun to explore how that material would work with his idea. It did, but only to an extent. (It melted in his printer.) After researching the material and calling DuPont, Adrian discovered that they had other materials made from high-density plastic fibers (olefins) that could do the job.

He had his solution! After winning the hearts and souls of the judges and the executives at the competition, Rubber Bandits went to market.

Esteemed Judges at the Staples Invention Quest Completion in NY

• Michael Pappas, Administrator, U.S. Small Business Administration
• Rayvon Fouche, Invention/Innovation Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Art Fry, 3M Inventor of the Post-it® Note
• Corey Greenberg, NBC Today Show Consumer Correspondent
• Joanne Hayes-Rines, Publisher, Inventor’s Digest
• Thomas Stemberg, Chairman and Founder, Staples

Staples Executives in Attendance at the Competition

• Ronald L. Sargent, President & CEO
• John Mahoney, Vice Chairman & CFO
• Demos Parneros, President US Stores
• Michael Miles, President & Chief Operating Officer
• Shira Goodman, Executive Vice President
• Dave Perron, Executive Vice President
• Jevin Eagle, Senior Vice President
• David D’Angelo, Senior Vice President
• Robert George, Senior Vice President
• Mark Bacon, Senior Vice President
• Kevin Downs, Regional Vice President
• Derrick Wood, Vice President
• Mike Nelson, Vice President
• Andrew Schneider, Director
• John Zarba, Director

Staples Licenses Rubber Bandits

In 2004, Staples® started the process of licensing Rubber Bandits within the context of an exclusive three-year agreement. In 2005, Rubber Bandits hit the shelves in over 1,400 stores throughout the United States and Canada and sold for four years.