The pop-up toaster. The electric toothbrush. The steam iron. By 1962, Hammacher Schlemmer had been debuting cutting-edge gadgets - literally, in the case of the electric razor - for decades. We’d become the go-to outlet for inventors to turn their innovations into household essentials for the everyday consumer.

But president Dominic Tampone thought we could take it a step further. What if we were the ones coming up with the inventions to begin with? Thus was born Invento Products Corporation, our in-house product development and wholesale company.

Just make it amazing

Early Invento creations were, to put it mildly, all over the place. Just one page from a 1967 catalogue runs the gamut from the Diet Computer (“calculates how much weight one loses or gains over any given period or after one meal”) to Za-Zoo Orangutan, a nearly 4’ tall doll covered in “long, wild, white hair from Icelandic sheep”.

The common denominator was the same spirit that drove Hammacher Schlemmer’s other offerings: it had to be unique, or unexpected, or the best. It had to solve problems in a fresh new way, or bring some unexpected delight to the customer’s life. Most of all, it had to make you stop and say “I never would have thought of that, but it’s just what I’ve been looking for.”

Kickstarter before Kickstarter

Other ahead-of-their-time Invento products included a hiking pedometer, the first white noise machines, and adapters to turn outdoor lighting off and on automatically. Invento didn’t just source products for Hammacher. It also opened Invento Shops in major national and regional department stores like Nieman Marcus and Stix, Baer and Fuller, and briefly, its own Invento shop in White Plains, New York. By 1970, annual Invento sales were $2.5 million - about $22 million in today’s dollars.

By then, the original idealistic notion of Invento as an innovation lab had turned into a unit that mostly sourced products from outside inventors. As Hammacher changed hands and strategies through the 1970s and 1980s, Invento as a separate entity receded in importance, folding back into the parent company. But that focus on innovation never went away.

The 2010s saw crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter become the hotbed of grassroots innovation that Invento had aspired to be. It validated Dominic Tampone’s instincts that there were many more inventions out there than the mainstream manufacturing industry was equipped to bring to market.

So here we present some of the crowdfunded products that fulfill that Invento vision. We like to think they’re the kind of thing Dominic Tampone would have championed, if only he’d had the Internet to work with back then.