The idea for ZipString blossomed during an engineering course at The Georgia Institute of Technology.
Stephen Fazio aimed to win a design competition where entries could only feature a circuit board the size of a credit card or smaller. He decided to base his design on a physics experiment he saw in middle school where a machine sent a loop of string spinning.
After creating the first ZipString prototype, Fazio’s church leader introduced him to Austin Hillam, another like-minded college student with a love for entrepreneurship and engineering.
“He was like, ‘Stephen, you really love engineering. Austin loves engineering. You guys should get together,’” Fazio says. “I had Austin over for dinner one night. Typically when you have somebody over for dinner, it’s like, maybe you’ll have them over at 6 p.m. and you’ll be done with dinner at 7, but I had to show off my bedroom electronics lab to Austin, and we just nerded out for five hours on this string launcher.”
From there, Fazio and Hillam set up shop in Hillam’s parents’ basement, tweaking the prototype and designing new ones. One day, in August 2021, Fazio decided to share his creation on TikTok. Fazio had already seen some viral success on the social media platform with other creations, but ZipString blew up, earning more than 20 million views across the internet and even appearing on Reddit’s home page. At the time, Fazio and Hillam were gearing up to launch ZipString on Kickstarter and didn’t even have a company name.
INTO THE SHARK TANK
ZipString reached its funding goal on Kickstarter, and the first 4,000 units were handmade in Hillam’s parents’ basement. More than a year later, in December 2022, the duo appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank, where they made a deal with Robert Herjavec and “Mr. Wonderful” Kevin O’Leary for $100,000 in exchange for 20% of the company. However, the deal with the sharks didn’t end up closing.
“It was a great experience, but in the end, we all parted ways,” Hillam explains. “It wasn’t the best deal. But overall working with them, it was awesome.”
While their Shark Tank deal fell through, ZipString’s appearance on the show led to Fazio and Hillam connecting with Robert Yusim, Founder and President of Product Counsel and a toy industry legend who played a key role in launching Moon Sand, Pixos, Havoc Heli, Pixicade, Wubble, and other hot toy brands.
I met the Spin Master guys in 1994 in their infancy as a company. When I saw Austin and Steven, it reminded me of the young guys from Spin Master. It really inspired me to want to help them turn their company from a one brand, one product company into a toy company with multiple brands, multiple products, and help them grow to become incredibly successful.
The company’s newest offering is ZipString Luma, a model featuring a glow-in-the-dark, phosphorescent string that starts to glow when exposed to a black light. As the string spins through the Luma, it gets charged for a brighter glow. Kids don’t need to understand the science behind the ZipString Luma to be amazed by it.
“One of the reasons that ZipString has become so popular and so viral is this phenomenon that we’ve called the smile of wonderment,” Hillam says. “What that is is whenever someone uses a ZipString, there is an expression caught in their face of pure, raw wonderment. It’s this expression where they don’t quite understand what’s happening, but it’s cool. It’s repeatable in every person, whether they’re 3 or 103, [a] boy, girl, lawyer, physicist, school teacher, [or] police officer. Everyone loves this.”
A version of this feature was originally published in The Toy Book’s 2024 LA Fall Toy Preview Issue. Click here to read the full issue! Want to receive The Toy Book in print? Click here for subscription options!
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