![]() One person with Parkinson’s wrote, "I absolutely LOVE it and am grateful for the gift. When I asked about customer success stories that Barnett would like to share, he pointed out that the company receives a “surprising amount of fan mail every week “ranging from middle-school boys and girls reaching out to express their love for the invention to people with Parkinson’s Disease writing to express gratitude for the free PopSockets we put into their hands and the dollars we raised for their support organizations. “Major milestones include figuring out how to get the accordion to fully collapse, signing our first major retail deal with T-Mobile in 2015, signing our first major influencer deal with Jenna Marbles in 2016, and-in 2017-creating a Department of DoGoods and opening offices in San Francisco, Finland, and Singapore,” Barnett replied. In the interview, I asked Barnett what he believed were some of the major milestones for the company. And now the company employs 120 people across Boulder, Colorado San Francisco, California Finland and Singapore. ![]() PopSockets started out with just one employee: Barnett himself. This year, PopSockets is on track for manufacturing 70 million products. In the first year, revenue hit $240,000 and PopSockets grew 800% every year. in the first year to 35 million PopSockets across 40 countries last year. ![]() Barnett said that its sales went from 30,000 PopSockets in the U.S. ![]() Now it is being sold at Amazon, Best Buy, Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, Walmart and a number of other stores. To date, I’ve not taken any institutional money.”īarnett started by selling PopSockets out of his garage back in 2014. I also raised about $500,000 from acquaintances who believed in the idea early on. “It sounds a bit too lucky, but I promise I didn’t start the fire, which took hundreds of homes in the mountains of Boulder. With the insurance money he received for lost contents, he was able to fund the business early on. In the summer of 2012, Barnett ended up losing his house during the series of Colorado wildfires. Here is the video that Barnett posted on Kickstarter: “I danced in my Kickstarter video, which delighted my mother and made tech bloggers uncomfortable,” Barnett quipped. After making 60 prototypes over the course of 15 months, Barnett launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the business in 2012. And then he created models for prototyping in China. To design the PopSockets, Barnett taught himself 3D CAD software for designing parts and assemblies. I spent the next several months developing my invention, the PopSockets grip: an accordion-based gizmo that collapses for pockets and expands to serve as a grip, a stand and a headset-management system.” “Unfortunately (or fortunately), I faced a new problem: my friends and family taunted me for my grotesque solution. I wrapped my headset neatly around the two buttons, and never again was my headset tangled,” said Barnett in the interview. “I ended up gluing two giant clothing buttons to the backside of my iPhone 3G, with tiny buttons as spacers and voila! Problem solved. How did he come up with the idea for PopSockets? Barnett said that he was tired of his earbuds getting tangled up so he drove to the nearest JOANN Fabric store to find a solution. Photo of PopSockets founder David Barnett PopSockets
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