This week's Someones 2 Know are recent graduates of UNR and young entrepreneurs.  The business partners met on campus, and in 2017 the pair got an idea for a new product - a hair accessory. They spent the 2018 year developing it and this year - creating it.

Meet Britney Khuu and Sion Gutentag.

"It started out basically as a stick with two pins," shares Sion, as he shows us one of the original designs of the product.

What started out as an idea - is now a bona fide product ready to go to market.  Nevada graduates Khuu and Gutentag invented a portable hair tie holder.

"Throughout my life I had these problems where I would lose hair ties constantly,” explains Britney “and we finally decided to figure out something to fix the problem."

They call it the Hair Tie Hub. The co-founder team of Khuu and Gutentag  made a detailed video showing off their new creation.

But, before that - they had to begin with the basics.

"We started with notebooks, we took some sketches and we kinds thought of different ideas for how we might be able to make a device that would be able to carry hair ties,” recalls Khuu.

"Probably the big thing that influenced us to even know this was possible is the DeLaMare library on UNR,”  Sion tell us.

That library - and the university's Innevation center, replete with 3-D printers, allowed Khuu and Gutentag to produce several prototypes of the Hair Tie Hub

Sion shows us some early models; “If you put them in order - I think, the first one didn't work at all"

They worked out the kinks and eventually got a finished product that does work

It took two years of hard work and lots of trial and error to get to this point - and...

"We're very lucky to have gotten funding through a local program that helped us get a patent,” smiles Britney, and a trademark. The team recently raised more than $10,000 on Kickstarter and next they'll hit a few trade shows;

"We're hoping to demonstrate our product there and try to see if we can capture the market"

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Britney and Sion are also working with a non-profit in Las Vegas to get their product in the hands of at-risk and homeless youth who often live out of their backpacks.

For more information on Hair Tie Hub or the developers, check out the link here

On facebook –

https://www.facebook.com/HairTieHub/

On Kickstarter - 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hairtiehub/hair-tie-hub-the-portable-hair-tie-holder