Osman Can Ozcanli

Osman Can Ozcanli, Contributor

I write about entrepreneurship and product design

3/16/2010 @ 6:00PM

Looking For The Next Post-It

The invention of the Post-It note by 3M was one of the 20th century’s great stories of unintentional product design. Two of the company’s engineers came up with a mildly sticky adhesive that the marketer’s didn’t know what to do with until a colleague starting using it for sticky bookmarks. The product took 12 years to go from invention to widespread market success.

I’ve been keeping my eye on another not-so-sticky adhesive, called micro-suction tape, that may have a chance to go Post-It. The first time I saw micro-suction tape was in June 2004 when Zachary Kaplan, founder of Inventables (the Chicago company I used to work for) walked into the office with a tape dispenser he bought at Office Max . He stuck the dispenser to the side of his desk and it clung there, thanks to the tape that lined the bottom. The dispenser stuck to every flat surface we could find, and it never lost suction, to paraphrase James Dyson, even after getting pulled off and stuck again dozens of times.

At the time very few companies in the U.S. had heard about the tape, which first appeared in Japan. Inventables started showing it to manufacturers such as Griffin Technology in Nashville, Tenn., which used the tape on its iTripNano radio receiver product to stick better to iPods. In the fall of 2008 Palm used it underneath the charging cradle for its Palm Treo Pro to prevent it from slipping on tabletops. They also used it on the recent Palm Touchstone product, which acts as speakerphone and charging cradle for the Palm Pre and Pixi.

The tape is an ingenious piece of engineering. It is made of an acrylic foam sheet pocked with suction cups so small they’re invisible to the naked eye. Once stuck on a surface, you can easily peel it from the edge because the sucking power of each cup is weak. But the total combined sucking power is extremely strong. So you really feel the adhesion when you try to pull it off a surface all at once vertically or horizontally. The manufacturer, Exel Trading (which is keeping the exact manufacturing process confidential), was kind enough to send me some samples. I took them to the department of mechanical engineering at the Izmir Institute of Technology in Izmir,Turkey to photograph with a special microscope designed to view the surface of materials.

Just like the manufacturer had claimed, the tape looked like the surface of the moon. The craters are scattered unevenly, and it didn’t look very beautiful. But those craters work, and they work extremely well. A 4-inch-by-1-inch piece of tape can easily hold up to one pound of weight. I tried a matchbox-size sheet, and it was able to securely hold up the charger of my Mac laptop. This is extremely strong when compared to other sticky surfaces that you can use over and over, like the sticky used on the 3M Post-it notes. The power is similar to a regular earth magnet, but magnets are often not safe to use with electronics and are not practical to carry around.

The tape, branded as Regabond-S, is not cheap: $45 per square meter. This would be a lot more expensive, about 40 times as much, as 3M sticky adhesive but it may be unfair to make such a comparison since the micro-suction tape was not intended to be a consumable. Although the micro-suction tape is stronger, the price and function is more comparable to a sheet magnet used on refrigerators, which sell for about $32 per square meter. This tape can be used in places such as glass windows or flat surfaces where magnets don’t work. I can even think of toys that might use this adhesive so kids could easily build temporary characters, vehicles or buildings just like Legos but with a little more creative freedom.

“Sales are growing rapidly,” says Tatsuo Kaneko, general manager of the sales division at Exel Trading, especially to customers in electronic appliances and cell phones. It is being used to secure docking stations or as gaskets in electronic components like LCD displays.

The real downside to this tape is that its craters can get filled up with dirt, but they are easy to clean to restore its stickiness. It only works on flat surfaces, since it functions like a suction cup. You also have to be careful to keep it away from water or rain because it will absorb moisture. But it revives its sticky properties once it dries.

3M turned a weak and seemingly useless adhesive into a simple and great application when it created the Post-it Note. Combined with a great idea, perhaps the micro-suction tape might one day help a company make a fortune too.

Here is more information on the material.

Osman Can Ozcanli is most famous for inventing products that solve user needs in unexpected ways, often utilizing a breakthrough material. He is best known for the Transparent Toaster and the Ozpack Book Strap.

See Also:

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