By Michael F. Carmichael
Jan. 6, 2011
Dan Martinson wanted to see if it was still possible to start a business and make a product in the U.S.
| Dan Martinson demonstrates the Gear Tie. |
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Martinson has started two businesses from scratch. His first was a small business in Minnesota he started back in 1995. By the time he sold it in 2006 he was providing weather seals and gaskets to companies such as John Deere, Caterpillar and others. His LTI Flexible Products extruded, molded and die-cut rubber and plastic seals that kept dirt and water and other elements out of the cabs of huge farm tractors and construction equipment as well as RVs and other more familiar consumer vehicles. By then, he says, he was all too familiar with the hoops a business had to jump through to be successful.
Selling the company left Martinson with a lot of time on his hands to get out on a four-wheel drive ATV into the woods and fields near his lake home in Minnesota. “One day I was trying to get something on the rack in the front and I get fed up with the bungee cords I had been using,” says Martinson. “I thought there must be a better way to do this. Later, I was going somewhere with my three kids – who all had iPods – and I must have spent 20 minutes untangling the cords on their ear buds.
“I put those two thoughts together and decided to come up with something that was a lot easier to use than bungee cords or plastic twist-ties – so that’s how Gear Ties came about,” Martinson explains. “I started developing the product from scratch, experimenting with different materials and wire combinations to make what I was looking for.”
That process took Martinson about a year of development. “Then I started looking for someone to make it for me,” he continues, “but it didn’t fit most people’s ‘comfort zone’ because the volume wasn’t there yet. So, I decided to make it myself.”
With his background in rubber and plastics, Martinson says “the economy was going down the tubes at that point and a lot of companies were unloading assets so I found the equipment I needed and set up a production line.”
| The Gear Ties comes in five different sizes. |
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Now, with six employees, Martinson is turning out Gear Ties by the thousands. They come in a variety of sizes from 3 to 32 inches and in a wide variety of colors that range from metallic pink and purple to forest green and black. What prompted the colors? “When you start something from scratch, especially when it’s a new product” Martinson says, “you show it around to friends and family to get their opinions.”
His original version was the longer variety of Gear Tie and “was geared toward outdoor use. They came in black, blue and green. Turns out that half of the American public’s favorite color is blue, so that blue had to be there. The black and green were more for the outdoors folk.”
When he designed the smaller ones Martinson got a very different result. “When I initially showed them to women I didn’t get a really good response. So I made the ends smaller and more attractive and tried to match the iPod Nano colors as best I could. Once I did that I got a really strong reaction from women and I thought that was a Good Thing,” he says, perhaps unconsciously borrowing a phrase familiar to Martha Stewart fans.
Once he had a product in hand, Martinson set out to market his Gear Ties. He had discovered that it was not that difficult to reach potential purchasing people in retail chains, but that it was harder to explain how Gear Ties were different from more traditional and familiar bungee cords and twist ties. A friend suggested that he post some videos of Gear Ties in use on YouTube. Martinson explains that after that it was much easier to make a sale because he could ask his prospect to watch the video as they were talking – and then talk about a sales contract.