Congratulations Imants Caklais and Michael Muscarella!

Imants Caklais is a designer of architectural scale models and resides in Latvia.  Originally Imants set out to design the ultimate indestructible bike lock but quickly learned that this would be almost impossible to make.  He came to the conclusion that bike locks don’t necessarily have to be impenetrable but they should at least be time-consuming for the robber to take off.  His invention idea has three bike lock straps that connect to one unit.  This main unit can lock and unlock all three straps.  He hopes this will save the owner time since he/she won’t have to lock three individual locks. Also, he hopes it will deter the robber from taking the bike, since it would take too long to cut all three straps.

The design team thought that this was a great product idea for an annoying problem.  They think there is a lot of potential providing that we can keep the weight down.  The marketing team said that this seems like an interesting problem to solve.  They hope that this will have mass appeal.  The viability team will want to partner with a vendor with experience making locks to design the internals.  They said protection seems available for the multi-lock/multi-cable concept if implemented in an innovative manner.

Michael Muscarella is a Group Creative Director from Virginia. When Michael’s son was a little younger, he loved to build Cardboard structures, everything from forts to space shuttles.  The problem was, there is no easy way to connect the cardboard pieces together without making it so difficult to take the structure apart when it is done being played with.  Now that Michael’s younger daughter is starting to make cardboard structures of her own, Michael and his son were determined to find a solution. They came up with a flexible structure that holds the cardboard in place that works better than duct tape, which is frustrating to work with, or rivets for cardboard, which are hard to remove from the cardboard. It works as a frame that supports the cardboard, but it would adjust to whatever angle is desired.

Cardboard boxes are so wasteful, so the Quirky design team loved the idea of finding a new use for them while also giving kids a creative outlet.  The multi-angled connectors can allow kids to use leftover boxes and ripped pieces of cardboard, that cannot be used as boxes any more, to build different cardboard constructions.  It is a simple idea that can be re-used with ease because it does not have to be ripped out of the cardboard and it will not consist of many small parts like comparable products.