This Entrepreneur Quit His Day Job To Make A Little Rubber Thing For Your Headphones



A cursory search under “headphone management” will bring up virtually hundreds of products. Spoolee’s novel contribution to the category is a twig adrift in an ocean of competition. This seems like a small and unusual product for us to cover but there are three things that make this product stand out and that are worth mentioning:

The industrial designer who created it—Ray Walker—quit a lucrative day job to go after this startup dream of his. That’s mostly what I want to talk about.
It is pretty clever…definitely filed under “holy crap, why didn’t I think of that.”
It mostly works as advertised.
But first the basics: what is it and how does it work. According to Ray, the idea for Spoolee came pretty quickly as he was solving a problem mentioned to him by his wife: her headphones kept getting knotted up and that was annoying. We’ve all been there.

So Ray created Spoolee—which recently completed it’s Kickstarter for funding—to solve this problem. Spoolee is a neoprene loop that fits on your finger, like a ring, and makes it super easy to roll your headphones around it until it’s fully wrapped. A Velcro loop, keeps it from unwinding.

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