Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh (nee dool-quen-teekh[1]) is an Irish artist, designer, inventor and entrepreneur. She won the 2018 European Inventor Award for Small and Medium Enterprises for Sugru, a mouldable glue that was described by Time magazine as one of the world's best inventions.
Early life and education
Ní Dhulchaointigh was born in Kilkenny. She grew up on a farm and was constantly repairing broken items. She studied sculpture. At the age of 23 she moved to London to study product design at the Royal College of Art.[2] Here she came up with the idea of Sugru, a mouldable elastomer that can be used to repair broken items.[2] She combined bathroom sealant with wood-dust powder, which resulted in bouncy ball that looked like wood.[3] She graduated in 2004.[4]
She partnered with James Carrigan and Roger Ashby to found the company FormFormForm in 2005 and develop Sugru.[2] She spent 8,000 hours in the lab developing the product, working with silicone scientists.[2] She demonstrated an early product at Electric Picnic.[5] She won a £35,000 grant from Nesta.[6] They ran out of funding in 2008, and used social media and crowdfunding to raise enough money to buy machinery, develop packaging and design a website.[4] They went on to secure £250,000 from Lacomp PLC in 2006.[7] The product eventually launched in December 2009 and sold out within 6 hours.[8] They were featured in Boing Boing and Wired.[4] She named Sugru after the Irish word súgradh, which means play.[8]
Sugru is sold in over 6,000 shops worldwide.[2] In 2010 Time magazine as one of the world's best inventions.[9] She delivered a Ted Talk at TEDxDublin in 2012.[10] Ní Dhulchaointigh was named as the Design Entrepreneur of the year by the London Design Festival in 2013.[11] She launched Sugru in B&Q shops across the UK and Ireland using a YouTube video to tell their customers about their product.[11][12]
By 2013, Sugru had been used on all seven continents.[6] Ní Dhulchaointigh was selected by EY as one of their top entrepreneurs of the year.[13] She was invited to give a keynote at 99U at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Her keynote, The Magic Is in The Process, discussed the six-year process from hmmm to eureka and wow!.[14] They developed a foil handle for fencers with fencing equipment manufacturer Leon Paul. In 2014 Sugru was described by The Guardian as a wonder material.[3] FormFormForm were estimated to turn over £3.6 million a year in 2016.[15]
Ní Dhulchaointigh spoke at InspireFest in 2017, where she estimated that Sugru had been used to fix more than ten million items.[16][17] They launched a Family-Safe formula that allows children to get involved with making.[18] She won the 2018 European Inventor Award for Small and Medium Enterprises.[19][20] She is the first Irish person to win a European Inventor Award in the history of the prize.[5] The company sold to Tesa in 2018 for £7.6 million.[21] She is part of the Awesome Foundation, who donate £1,000 into a different idea every month.[4] From 2023, she has been a director on the board of the Irish home building non-profit Common Knowledge.[22]
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