We recently connected with ROBERT BECKER and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, ROBERT thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

In 1982, I took a 3-D design course taught by the sculptor/designer Erwin Hauer, and he showed the class some of his works that involved repeating units of hyperbolic surfaces (For hyperbolic, think Pringles potato chip!). Fast forward 6 or 7 years and my daughter Jenna and I are playing with a plastic construction set comprised of squares and triangles that link together along their edges. It’s fun, but I thought, “Hmm, what if these pieces were hyperbolic? Could some structures be made similar to the amazing works that Hauer had shown us?” Being a new father and a high school chemistry teacher, I didn’t have much time to devote to it. I tried making a prototype set with toothpicks and duct tape and saw some promise in the idea. But I decided to table it for a while. That while turned into thirty years! Then 3-D printing became a thing, and in 2019, with my retirement around the corner, I finally decided to act on the idea. Two students of mine that year gave me help/suggestions that proved quite valuable. David Gill showed me some of the basics of 3-D printing and suggested I make the hyperbolic tiles out of intersecting straight lines instead of a continuous surface. I committed to that but was still wrestling with how to connect the tiles. That’s when another student, Lily Bartin, off-handedly suggested I use “Lego hands” to enable the connectors to grab onto the side rails of each tile. That was huge! I borrowed a couple of 3-D printers over the summer, made some decent prototypes, and started playing with them. I quickly realized that there were not just one or two cool shapes you could build with these things, but a nearly infinite variety of amazing structures. I tweaked the prototypes and gave them to friends with young kids to play-test and give me feedback. I tweaked them some more, and then in the summer of 2021, I ran a Kickstarter campaign and got all my friends, family, former students, and colleagues to support it. And that’s how HyperTiles was born!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I graduated from college in 1983 and went right away into teaching high school chemistry. I loved teaching, loved the students and loved the subject matter. I developed some unusual chemistry labs and demonstrations that led to an entire secondary career – traveling all over the country and even far reaching locales like Ireland and Kuwait, doing chemistry presentations for teachers, for students, for the general public. I was Missouri Teacher of the Year in 2011 and as a result, got to meet one-on-one with my favorite US President of all times! I retired in 2020 after 36 years in the classroom, and decided to do something completely different. This idea for a hyperbolic construction toy had been on the back-burner for 30 years, and I decided what-the-heck. I started designing things for 3-D printing, sending out requests to injection mold companies, developed a business webpage, signed up for a Kickstarter campaign, learned about advertising and business insurance and shipping and approaching vendors, and exhibiting at conferences and…. All things that have been completely outside of my area of expertise and outside of my comfort zone, but I figured what the heck!

Whatever profits the company ends up making will go straight to charities – ones that my wife and I have been supporting for years. (Feel free to visit my website to learn more about which charities) Since I am considering this more of an adventurous retirement “hobby” than a got-to-make-money business, I am just enjoying the ride and all the people I am meeting and networking with along the way. I’ve had several people suggest I ought to take this on Shark Tank, and I truly believe that would take all the joy out of it. I am my only employee – I’m growing the company at my own pace, and I am happy to keep it stress-free and fun. I especially enjoy the many classroom visits I’ve been asked to do at local elementary and middle schools. The kids get so excited about what they are able to create.

HyperTiles are unique in many ways. As a toy, they have a very quick gratification return. Kids (and adults) playing with the tiles get hooked very quickly and within minutes are creating structures that are intriguing and surprising. But HyperTiles also have real “staying power.” One can easily find oneself immersed in HyperTile exploration for an entire afternoon – each new discovery posing more questions to be explored.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?

I signed up for my first exhibition booth last November at the NAGC (National Association for Gifted Children) Convention in Indianapolis. Being new and completely unheard of, I wanted something that would draw people to the booth. I came up with the idea of giving each person who came by a HyperTile to pin to their conference lanyard. The HyperTile had glued to its center a small square piece of cardstock with a QR code that linked to my website and one of a hundred large printed numbers 00 through 99. The visitors were told to go out and find another participant whose tile number matched theirs. When they did, they were to come back to the booth and claim their prize – they each got a Starter set of HyperTiles. The marketing game turned out to be way more successful than I had anticipated. All conference long, I had attendees coming up saying they were told to come to my booth! I would remark “So, you feel incomplete without your HyperTile!” They ate it up! Participants realized that the more people who got these HyperTiles, the better their chances were of winning. I heard stories of people meeting their matches on elevators, tweeting out their HyperTile numbers on social media, spotting another tile-wearing participant at a restaurant. And even those that were not successful at finding their match made a point of coming back to my booth to let me know how much they appreciated playing the game – if for no other reason than that it got them talking to and meeting new people. As it turned out they had rearranged the Exhibit Hall floor space just before the conference and stuck me and four other vendors off in a corner that otherwise would have seen very little traffic. Those other vendors were thus thrilled to have the game going on, because it brought so many potential customers to their booths as well. And I also had several other vendor booth workers coming to pick up a HyperTile number to wear – knowing that it would serve to get participants over to their booths to see if they matched!

The next conference I signed up for (and brought the matching game to) was in Boston last January for the JMM (the Joint Mathematics Meetings) for hard-core mathematicians from around the world. I figured most folks there would recognize the hyperbolic paraboloid shape from across the room (which they did!), but I feared that serious mathematicians might look down upon such a frivolous game (which they most certainly did not!) They loved it even more than the gifted resource teachers did, and I ended up handing out more than 800 tiles and giving away free starter sets to over 240 winners! Then in March, there was a Montessori teachers conference (also in Boston) and the teachers were even crazier about it.

Hugely successful marketing idea? Maybe. Did all that excitement translate into sales – not necessarily, but I made the decision that I wasn’t going to overanalyze it. It was fun – it initiated a lot of networking, and although it was a lot of work both before and during the conference, it was a marketing tool I would continue to use.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

Thirty years ago, when I first had the idea for HyperTiles, I had no way of making a decent prototype. I used some duct tape and toothpicks and taped them together and saw that there were a few cool shapes that could be made, but I didn’t have the resources or time to launch the project back then. Fast forward 30 years, and 3-D printing has appeared on the scene, and I’m preparing to retire from 36 years of science teaching. I learn to use CAD tools on my laptop, and I recruited a few students to help me figure things out. One (David Gill) came up with the idea of having the tiles be a grid of intersecting straight lines, rather than a solid-filled tile. This not only looked better, it saved on plastic, it showed off the structure better, it made for some amazing shadow patterns when the structures are held up to a light, but most importantly, it paved the way for them to be connected together in a nearly infinite variety of modes. It was another (Lily Bartin) who suggested I use “Lego hands” for connectors. That allowed for multiple connection sites and a full 360* of rotation. I borrowed a couple of printers over the summer from our school, printed out a few hundred tiles and connectors, revised them and then revised them some more. And then of course, I had kids – mostly the children of colleagues from my school – play test them and help me make them even better.

Then it came to getting them manufactured. I knew that to make a really good durable product, they would need to be injection molded, and that can have a rather high start-up cost to pay for the molds.  I had three goals in mind: 1) I wanted to get them out there at an affordable price so that they would be accessible to all children of all ages. 2) I wanted to use any profits to support a few favorite charities of mine and my wife’s  3) I wanted to have them made and packaged in the US.  I sent the designs off to at least twenty US injection mold companies and met with dead end after dead end. Many did not even bother to return my emails or calls. Those that did said they didn’t have the expertise to manufacture such a shape.  Finally one company in Michigan said they could make an experimental mold – which they couldn’t guarantee would actually work, and I would have to put up $120,000 for it. If it did work, the production costs they quoted me would force me to charge about $80 per set to show any profit. I was getting very discouraged, and then, by total happenstance, I met a friend of a my brother’s who was very excited about the product and he just happened to work for a business in St. Louis that contracted with an injection mold company in Yuyao City, China whom they had researched and visited and thought very highly of.  He put me in touch with the engineer in China, who emailed me right back: “No problem. The mold will cost $7000 – satisfaction guaranteed. If it ever wears out, they would pay to replace it. On top of that the production costs would be about one-fourth what they were in the US.  I realized that I could (at least for the time being) only reach goals one and two. Goal three was not to be.  This engineer in China has been amazing – very responsive to my design ideas and very professional.  The order I originally contracted for was for 10,000 sets. I then asked for 1000 of those sets to be rush-ordered to get them to my Kickstarter backers in time for Christmas 2021. He had them ready in September, but with the shipping delays of that year, they didn’t reach me until December 18 – but that still worked.  Then I asked if I could just get another 3500 sets – knowing that I did not have room in my garage for the remaining 9000!  He said no problem. It was then over a year before I was ready to order more – a year that saw crazy world-wide inflation rates. When I just last month put the order in for another 3500 sets, I was pretty sure he was going to tell me that he would have to hike the price up 5-10% due to the increased cost of the materials. He did not.

One other thing: The tiles come in a clear plastic box with the rainbow of tiles stacked inside like square pringles chips. I had envisioned having whatever company manufactured the tiles and connectors ship them to me in large boxes of separate components. The engineer at the company explained that packing the HyperTiles into the boxes was already in the price he had quoted me. I said, well ok then, but didn’t realize how much of a savings that was. If I had them shipped separately, there would not only be extra tariffs involved, but even more important, I’d be paying about three times as much for the actual shipping. When one has shipments sent overseas, weight is not that important: volume is. When they are stacked together in their boxes, the HyperTile sets are truly as compact as they can get – zero wasted space.  If they had instead been thrown in boxes loosely, they would occupy about three times the volume. (Compare a 6 oz bag of potato chips to a 6 oz can of pringles.)

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hypertiletoy.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HyperTileToy
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/HyperTileToy
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs3uxTPY376NA7H34bPhRtQ

Image Credits
The photo of the older gentleman (Erwin Hauer, who was the original inspiration for HyperTiles) was taken by Matthew Cavanaugh, and he has given me permission to use it