What do you get the man who can’t sit still? Small investors are flocking to a new toy aimed at compulsive fidgeters – now the makers just have to satisfy demand

Fidget much? Ever get bored in meetings? Apparently you’re not alone. A product aimed at the untapped market of people who compulsively click pens, spin key rings or pop bubble wrap has so far attracted more than $3.4m in funding from crowdsourcing site Kickstarter and is on course to be one of its most popular fundraisers ever.

The Fidget Cube, a cube with six different clickable, spinnable, flickable sides at varying degrees of annoying loudness, was designed by Matthew and Mark McLachlan through their company Antsy Labs. The cube, described as “a cube for people who fidget”, is a small, mostly vinyl, square with some satisfying-feeling metal pieces and rubber buttons to poke at and flick during tense or boring moments.

Fidget Cube is currently Kickstarter’s fifth-most lucrative project and it’s still open to backers for another 37 days. For comparison, award-winning screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion film Anomalisa, which won the Grand Jury prize at the Venice film festival, raised about $406,000 on Kickstarter, an eighth of Fidget Cube’s haul so far. The Guardian described Anomalisa as “a masterpiece about the human condition – with puppets”.

Fidget Cube is hot on the heels of the fundraising company’s most-funded project to date, a card game called Exploding Kittens. It raised $8.8m.



Fidget Cube: It’s a cube for people who fidget

In a video that parodies a TV ad for pharmaceuticals, Marc McLachlan stares soulfully at the camera and describes his battle with fidgeting; after a few minutes his brother takes over and shares some less dire-sounding quasi-medical jargon about the uses of fidgeting for people with short attention spans.

The toy has caught on. The project launched on 30 August and had reached its modest $15,000 goal by the end of day one. By 8 September it had broken the $1m mark. By the end of last week it had attracted more than $2m. Over the weekend, it made over a million dollars more.

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The brothers are now in the awkward position of having to manage expectations as they attempt to ship out at least 60,000 Fidget Cubes; though they say the product design is done, they now have to scale up production to a level they hadn’t anticipated.

“Fidget Cube is a finalized product that already has the kinks worked out, so we never expected to have issues with meeting this delivery date. However, at the time of writing this, we have about 60,000 backers – a thought that deeply moves us and motivates us to not let you down. We are working tirelessly on getting some concrete answers. What we can tell you is that we will be transparent about everything, especially the ship date. Please don’t perceive silence on any one issue as unwillingness to communicate (we’re working overtime on such issues so that we can provide solid answers, not just best guesses).”

Luckily, the pair have a tool to help them manage the potentially stressful situation.