"Bunch O Balloons" is a new invention inspired by God that helps families prepare 100 water balloons in under a minute, and it's already raised over $275,000 on
crowdfunding site Kickstarter since being posted on Tuesday.
"Our family does a lot of water ballooning in the summer and we’ve always filled and tied them the old fashioned way and tried the gadgets that are supposed to help but didn’t," the product's inventor, a Texas-based father named Josh Malone,
told ABC News. Malone said the idea was co-developed by his wife, Alison, and eight kids, ages 4 to 18. "After tens of thousands of balloons we started thinking of a better way."
Bunch O Balloons is made of plastic, and features 37 unfilled balloons attached to 37 straws that gather into a single hub. That hub screws onto the end of standard-gauge garden hoses, which fills up the balloons in a jiffy. With rubber bands pre-attached to the balloons, the customers can simply shake the balloons free once they're filled.
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With a pledge of $15, customers can reserve three of the bunches, totaling over 100 balloons.
The Malone family originally debuted the prototype at the American International Toy Fair in New York City, but decided to the best way to go about mass-producing them was to raise money on a crowdfunding website. They were astonished when the campaign went viral, blowing past the initial goal of raising $10,000 in just days.
"It’s so obviously simple it should have been done a long time ago," said Malone.
"The name of my business is TINNUS, which stands for, 'There Is Nothing New Under the Sun.' For me, it’s a matter of God bringing it to my mind. I can’t create something new. I can just work with the things He's already made and this product is a good example of that."
The product had nearly 8,000 backers as of Friday afternoon, with 27 days remaining to gather more pledges.
Malone originally planned to kick off a semi-automated production line in the fall, and move to a fully automated line by April 2015. When Kickstarter campaigns outraise their original funding goal, however, they will sometimes change that timeline in an effort to lower the cost of production through an increased manufacturing scale.
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