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Five genius pieces of product design - and they're all available through Betterware

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By Jennifer Faull, Deputy Editor

May 26, 2014 | 3 min read

When people talk about design and tech genius today, they more often than not speak of Apple with Steve Jobs and Sir Jony Ive or perhaps Facebook and Zuckerberg. Few 'Design Genius Lists' will name the folks at Betterware. Until now. The Drum took at look through the Betterware catalogue and selected its favourite pieces of innovative design.

The toilet seat – undoubtedly one of the most important, and underrated, design innovations civilization has ever seen. A plain white ceramic bowl and seat is good, great even, but who says you can’t have a toilet seat that is both funny AND functional. “I have gone through loads of toilet seats over the years but I have finally found one that is not only sturdy and comfortable but is really funny as well and a real talking point with all my friends,” says one avid reviewer of the ‘Sex in the Country Toilet Seat’. “It has now got to the stage where people come round to my house just to use my bathroom (I naively thought it was my cooking skills.).”
Given how attached we have all become to our mobile devices, I write with utter conviction that the SporKnife will become the must-have tool of this generation. Think of all the emails, calls, increasingly bizarre Snapchats we could get through If only we didn’t have to use both a knife and a fork when eating a meal. Thousands I tell you. Thousands.
When the ad industry was asked what their favourite ever design invention was, over 99 per cent said the bottle opener* And with Cannes coming up never has the bottle opener been more important to help you crack into a poolside beer, a wine or celebratory glass of champers. It can even help you with that bottle of painkillers the next morning. The words ‘design genius’ don’t get banded about often, but...*note, this was not a real study, completely fabricated.
Some of us, you know who you are, would throw our grannies under a bus if it meant an extra 20 minutes of battery life on our phones. Beautiful, sleek or sexy it is not, but the In-car Dual Charger is a design innovation to be praised for centuries to come, Or at least until those pesky people at Apple can design a phone that doesn’t require a battery boost every six hours.
A lesson in design simplicity comes from Toe Tubes. The little fabric tubes wrap around any sore toes providing “instant relief” for those of you who have worn down your feet pounding the pavements going from meeting to meeting. And the design genius doesn't end there. Oh no. They can be popped in the washing machine so that you can use them again and again. In today’s world it’s not often a product is designed to be effective and economical.

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