File this under "That's Cool!"...I had a strategy session with a group of colleagues off-site on Friday and one of them, a Minneapolis native, mentioned a "cool little company" called Zubbles. As background, my colleague is a marketing/brand management guy with very little domain expertise/interest in the world of technology investing...he gets marketing, he gets brand, he gets consumer products and services.
So what are Zubbles? They're vibrant, colored bubbles that don't stain. Sounds simple, right? But soap bubbles have been around for more than 60 years and no one has been able to create a colored bubble before. You can see a video demo here.
Zubbles, as it turns out, is the name of the product not the company [that would be Ascadia, Inc.]. The key players in Ascadia are Guy Haddleton, Tim Kehoe and Sue Strother, the team behind Adaytum; which was sold to Cognos in 2002. At first glance, it would seem odd for this trio of financial software executives to turn their attention to colored bubbles, but there is more here than meets the eye.
Tim Kehoe was a toy designer first and foremost, joining Adaytum in 1999. He has been working on the colorization of bubbles for more than 11 years. As it turns out, the chemistry behind creating a colored bubble that didn't leave any residue or stains upon popping was a complex scientific task...from the Popular Science article:
It turns out that coloring a bubble is an exceptionally difficult bit of chemistry. A bubble wall is mostly water held in place by two layers of surfactant molecules, spaced just millionths of an inch apart. If you add, say, food coloring to the bubble solution, the heavy dye molecules float freely in the water, bonding to neither the water nor the surfactants, and cascade almost immediately down the sides. You'll have a clear bubble with a dot of color at the bottom. What you need is a dye that attaches to the surfactant molecules and disperses evenly in that water layer. Pack in more dye molecules, get a deeper, richer hue. Simple. Well, on paper anyway.
Bubbles are big business. According to Popular Science, more than 200 million bottles of clear soap bubbles are sold annually. Toy companies have been chasing this idea for as long as Kehoe, in fact, several sources suggest Hasbro has worked on a non-stain colored bubble for at least two years.
As a father of two and someone who appreciates when science leads to tangible business opportunities, this is a company I'll be keeping an eye on...whether it turns out to be simply a "that's cool" or the precursor to a much larger opportunity remains to be seen.
zubbles ascadia woodrow consumer tech toy science toys adaytum
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