76 If you’d told us two years ago that, just shy of 60, we’d be inventing, patenting and licensing a brand-new product to an international manufacturer, we’d have laughed and gone back to what we know best (in my case, that’s writing novels; in Ade’s, after decades as a firefighter, now being a semi-retired carpenter and kitchen fitter). Neither of us had any ambition to become entrepreneurs. Like many inventions, ours began not with a business plan but by wanting to remedy the cause of a mild irritation. In July 2024 we were on a bus on Vancouver Island, heading back from a three-week house swap. I was crocheting, as I always do when travelling, and my ball of wool kept dropping off my lap and rolling away along the grubby bus floor. Watching me retrieve it yet again, Ade said, casually, “What you need is something to anchor the wool to your body.” Within minutes we were batting ideas back and forth: some sort of holder, attached to the arm? Like a bloodpressure cuff or those phone armbands runners use? Surely someone must already have thought of this. A quick Google search suggested otherwise. The wrist-strap yarn holders that you sometimes see were the closest to a solution, but having tried these, I found the wool gets even more in your way, swinging around and banging against your lap or side. By the time we got home, the idea had legs — or at least an arm. Ade disappeared into his workshop. The first prototype was dreadful (involving a plastic bowl and some optimistic cutting), but the second version worked really well: a curved bracket worn on the upper arm, with a spool that allowed the yarn to feed smoothly without snagging or escaping. The moment of realisation was immediate and slightly alarming. It actually worked! With the help of YouTube, we applied for a provisional patent and trademarked the name YarnArm. What did we do next? We had no idea. In our twenties or thirties, we might have blithely charged ahead, convinced we could build a business from scratch. In our late fifties, we were more realistic. Manufacturing, shipping, marketing, international patents — it all sounded very expensive, exhausting and high-risk. How a novelist and a retired firefighter brought a new craft product to market. Louise Voss and Adrian Grieves of Harcourt Innovations Ltd., tell us more about their journey NEVER TOO LATE TO INVENT
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