Product Development Knoxville TN

Entrepreneur: Abbie Rapport
Company: www.memorymakerbracelet.com

In 2002, the mother of three was on a business trip when her airplane seat mate was a grandmother with six grandchildren. Granny proudly pulled out a slick photo album of her brood. A frustrated Abbie could only produce a series of worn and creased photos of her boys from her wallet.

But her frustration instantly yielded an idea for a product that would solve the problem: a stretchable bracelet with a series of miniature frames for pictures of kids, grandchildren, pets, plants - whatever you want to display. She named it the Memory Maker Bracelet . Abbie also quickly came up with a template system that would help customers crop and reduce their photos to exactly the right size for the frames in the bracelet.

"My husband recognized it could be a big hit because it wasn't just something that jewelers would be interested in selling," Abbie says. "He recognized that Memory Maker was something that would appeal to the photography and scrapbooking industries, too. And we've found that drug stores want to carry the Memory Maker to help replace photo-related sales that they're losing because nobody buys film anymore."

Abbie and and her husband's instincts have been confirmed as Memory Maker has become a huge hit. The company has sold more than 1.5 million bracelets in less than two years at a typical retail price of about $20.

Abbie's Key Move: Getting in the Zone for a Big Idea

Author: Rich Sloan

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