Sunday, Mar 8 2026
THE MAKING
It's the coffee chat you didn't want to overthink. It's the fifteen minutes before it, standing in front of the mirror, hair up or down?
It's not really about a clip. It's about the fifteen minutes before every important thing — interviews, first dates, coffee chats that could turn into something. The fifteen minutes where you just want to look great but look yourself.
The idea — A coffee chat I almost went to with my hair down, because nothing in my drawer felt right. My mom handed me a clip with too big of a logo. I had others: one from Amazon, tacky, no "class." One in pink and purple, cute! But wrong for a room full of higher ups in blazers. I wanted to look "利索点": Neat. Put together. Nothing fussy, but I didn't have that.
Why did put-together have to mean plain? Why did pretty have to mean loud?
I decided to make the one I couldn't find.
I more or less knew what I wanted: flat against the head. No spring showing, front or back. Something between a banana clip's shape and a claw clip's grip — because banana clips never held my hair the way claw clips did.
We started with acetate. It's beautiful material — biodegradable, recyclable, the kind of thing you feel good about wearing. But it comes in 2.5mm sheets, thin enough to cut into your hand every time you pinch it open. We didn't love how it looked in 2.5mm, either.
A friend had a 3D printer. We started printing our own samples just to hold something in our hands while we kept looking for suppliers — six rounds, small changes each time, until the shape finally felt right.
We went back to the suppliers, asked if they could help build with thicker acetate boards. Twenty something suppliers said no can't do. Gosh, rejection really isn't the best feeling.
But we needed to test the shape, and 3D printing took too long on my friend's printer. So we ordered a batch from a 3D printer factory. Six colors, ready for friends and family. Or so we thought.
The hinges cracked, the heat got to them, the bottoms warped in the car. They ended up in a box in my parents' garage.
At this point we were about to give up. Such a small thing, a claw clip, was so hard. Were we never going to make a clip we really loved?
We found our supplier the way you find most good things — through someone who knew someone. They were expensive, but they understood what we were trying to do, and somehow decided to take a chance on us: they were willing to layer four sheets of that same 2.5mm acetate down to 8mm, solid enough to finally feel right in the hand.
Three months later, the first batch was born. Two hundred pieces. That's how this shape was born.
Thirty months, start to finish. Some things just take as long as they take. We think you can feel it, in the hand.
Thank you to everyone who made an introduction, gave us honest feedback, or took a chance on two girls overly obsessed with a claw clip. We're still at the beginning of our own story, yet to be written. We hope you love the clip as much as we do, truly.
