Since the first 1,000 packets of Sugru sold out in six hours in 2009, Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh has had many pinch-me moments. When Time Magazine listed Sugru in their top 50 inventions of 2010, Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh found herself in – or rather, beating – esteemed company.

“It came in ahead of the iPad,” says the entrepreneur recently named by Business Insider as one of the coolest women in technology in Britain. Even though she actually grew up on a farm in Co Kilkenny.

To the uninitiated, Sugru (based on the Irish word for play, súgradh) is a self-setting rubber that can be moulded like playdough to fix or modify almost anything, with more than 500,000 users in 158 countries to date.

While now based in London, Jane was raised in Keatingstown near Kilkenny city, where her parents John and Eilís Delahunty ran a sheep and cattle farm. She says her rural childhood instilled the core values that inspired Sugru: if something can be mended, reused or re-purposed, why waste it?

“On a farm you never throw anything away just in case you find a use,” she says, referencing the pallets her father used as pens for lambs, plastic milk cartons that were turned into meal scoops or the old tyres that covered the silage pit.

She even recalls studying the old tyre brands that would surface year after year.

“It’s a horrible job covering a silage pit,” she admits. “You look for any fun where you can find it.”

After school, Jane studied sculpture, but while she found the course challenging, she felt drawn to more practical projects.

“I really wanted to do something where I felt I could improve people’s everyday life,” she says simply.

Getting started

Just what, she didn’t know. However, while studying product design in London in 2003, Jane started experimenting with different materials and one day mixed some silicone bathroom seal with waste wood dust.

“I just rolled it up into a ball and left it on the desk,” she recalls, “but when I came back after my lunch, I picked it up and for some reason just let it fall onto the floor.

“It really looked like a ball of wood, but instead of just falling, it bounced up like a ping pong ball to the ceiling. I just thought: ‘That’s amazing’.”

Playing with the prototype, Jane used it to fix niggly problems in her home, like modifying the handle on her kitchen knife to make it more comfortable, but after deciding to devote her final year project to it, she struggled to find one major use for it.

Fortunately, her then boyfriend now husband, Laois native James Carrigan, was on hand to point out what was right in front of her all along.

“James just took me by the hand and brought me into the kitchen and said: ‘Jane, what if it isn’t one big idea? What if it’s thousands of small ideas? And what if it isn’t you that’s the creative one finding the uses for this, but everybody else? What if every granny who found it hard to open a shampoo bottle or found the tap uncomfortable to turn could make it work better?’ And for me, that was just when the penny dropped,” she says.

“It’s not just designers or manufacturers who know how to solve problems. Just as on the farm where we have to solve problems constantly, lots of people are like that and I thought if there was an easy enough way to fix things or modify them to work better with this material it could be really successful.”

Growing “obsessed” with the concept, Jane came up with 100 different modifications or quick-fixes (like mending a broken pot lid) using a space-age style super rubber that would be easy to mould, would bond to different materials and would be durable.

“Of course it didn’t exist yet,” says Jane. “It was just an idea.”

Determined to make it a reality, Jane and James got business partner Richard Ashby on board, two scientists retired from the silicone industry and a patent lawyer.

Finding the money

Nesta – the British innovation think tank – awarded Sugru a £35,000 grant to get off the ground, but after paying one lab £5,000 for just three experiments, Jane decided to set up her own lab. So began the slow progress (8,000 lab hours in total) to make Sugru tick all the necessary boxes, from being dishwasher-proof to withstanding temperatures of -50° C to 180°C. Bigger companies expressed an interest in partnerships, but by 2008 nobody would take the risk to launch it and the company was scraping by on an overdraft. Rather than losing hope, Jane describes this time as an “amazing turning point”.

Giving themselves a six-month deadline, they managed to raise £100,000 from a private investor to finalise the formulation, buy a small mixer, build a packing machine and set up a website, with 1,000 packets of Sugru ready for launch on 1 December 2009.

“I realised that if it was ever going to happen that we’d need to prove the market ourselves,” she says. “It was saying: ‘Look, it’s now or never’.”

Success

She could have never imagined that after The Daily Telegraph published a review giving Sugru 10 out of 10, they’d sell out in just six hours, with the next 2,000 packs for pre-order selling out in 10 hours. Soon, investors were banging down their door and after building a factory to scale up production and online sales, Sugru is now available in over 6,000 stores across 12 countries – a 300% increase since 2013 alone.

This includes major chains like B&Q in Britain and Radioshack in the US, with a further rollout in the States in Target stores from March and expansion into Canada and wider Europe throughout 2015. Other highlights include winning the London Design Week design entrepreneur of the year award in 2012 and, most recently, Living Wage company of the year, with Sugru now employing 40 staff at its Hackney factory.

However, the real success for Jane is seeing how customers are using Sugru, from a man who adapted his ski poles for a more comfortable trek to the North Pole to a parent who used it to customise cutlery and a wheelchair controller for his daughter who has a condition that affects her muscles and everything in between.

“I love seeing applications that can help millions of people solve little problems, because that’s what it’s about at the end of the day,” says Jane. “It’s all about keeping our stuff going for longer.”

A true farmer’s daughter.

Visit www.sugru.com