You needn’t be an avid fashion designer, à la a Project Runway contestant, to create your own men’s dress shirt. All you need is access to a cool website. Like Blank Label.
On Blank Label most anyone can create their own shirt—within limits, of course. The basic shirt concept and range of fabrics is pre-determined. But within that, it is impressive how many design options you have.
Here’s a creative idea that’s part artsy, part CSI and all cool: fingerprint rings. That is, a ring with a fingerprint implanted into the metal.
Each person’s fingerprint is unique. So incorporating the fingerprint of your special someone on an engagement ring or wedding band is a way of making the jewelry equally as unique. (Insert a pun about fingerprint rings possessing a “personal touch” here.)
For such an unusual sounding idea, a surprising number of jewelers offer fingerprint rings. Here’s a rundown of our four favorites:
You drag yourself to work on a Monday morning, walk into your office bathroom, get a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and are startled to see that in your hung over, coffee deprived, half-asleep state you only managed to shave half of your stubble.
Oh no! What are you going to do?
For such circumstances, there’s a Crazor—an emergency razor that folds down to the size of a credit card. Keep it next to your actual credit cards and you’ll always have a razor with you when you leave the house (unless you lose your wallet).
Making a fully waterproof running and hiking shoe is really hard. Doubly so if you want that shoe to be lightweight. Sealing the seams and using water-resistant fabrics can help. But if you spend enough time stomping around in enough water, every “waterproof” shoe will eventually be breached.
So in the spirit of If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, Columbia is introducing their Powerdrain hybrid water shoe. It has a drainable footbed, with points in both the heel and forefoot—so when water does get into the shoe it can easily flow out.
It isn’t a multi-purpose tool that happens to look good. Wenger’s HypeX Jewelry is designed look like jewelry first and foremost. It just happens that these jewelry pieces can also function as screwdrivers or fire starters or wire strippers or the like.
Shoes are luggage space hogs. When we pack shoes we usually stuff the insides with socks and underwear. But we like this idea better: Shoes that fold up. Like the colorful Timberland Radler Trail Camp line.
Radler Trail Camps don’t only fold closed. They zip closed too. That thanks to the zipper that rings the shoe’s 42% recycled rubber lug outsole. (The zipper, fortunately, is mostly hidden from view when the shoe is open). When zipped closed, a 225g (8 oz) Radler Trail Camp is compact enough to fit into a jacket pocket.
Spot Cool Stuff can get geeky when it comes to airport codes. Those three letter combinations unique to every airport, used on all manner of airline documents from tickets and checked bag tags, are familiar to every frequent air traveler. So it was only a matter of time before some one incorporated those codes into the design of travel gear.
That some one turned out to be Jason Solarek, a former journalist and diplomat in South America. Solarek apparently shares our love of airport codes because he’s made them central to host of products collectively called Airwear.
Last year humans world wide spent an estimated US$100 billion on products for dogs. With a market that big is it surprising that some of those products would be, shall we say, sub-optimal?
With that in mind Spot Cool Stuff decided to take one of our occasional breaks in our quest for superlative stuff and look instead for the worst. In this case, the worst dog products we could find.
If you’re more feline inclined don’t feel left out—we’ll review the worst cat gadgets and products in the future. Sign up for our design RSS feed to get that, and all our tech articles, delivered to you by email. Or join us on Twitter or Facebook, to be notified when that comes out.
