James Gibson
BinFix Ltd.
www.binfix.co.uk
Nottingham, England
Age: 24
Necessity, invention's mother. Back in 2002, when James Gibson was a student in sports management at Brighton University, his roommate complained that nobody ever emptied the overflowing trash pail in the kitchen or replaced the bin liner. “What we need is a liner that comes up from the bottom of the bin,” the roommate said. Lightbulb moment. Gibson became obsessed with the idea and, improbably, turned it into a company.
In 2004, he moved to Nottingham and applied for space at a local business incubator. By last year, he had filed for a patent, developed a working prototype, and started looking for manufacturers. The product: a triangular cardboard box, stuffed with extra-thick trash bags, that lives at the bottom of the can. Pull one bag out, and another comes up to take its place.
A few trade shows and an award for household cleaning product of the year by Grocer magazine got BinFix noticed, and Gibson started getting orders from supermarkets. But building a company with the scale to compete against giants like Proctor & Gamble looked too daunting, so Gibson decided to license the concept to an as-yet-unnamed consumer products company. Now, with a potential royalty stream of tens of thousands of pounds annually, Gibson is pursuing a raft of new business ideas. Clearly, a young entrepreneur to watch.
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