We haven’t been this envious of an invention since Flubber.
At 15-years-old, Arminder Singh Dhillon recently became the youngest ever entrepreneur to receive an investment on Dragon’s Den. He managed to tempt three of the notoriously difficult-to-please Dragons into lumping some money on his pretty ingenious invention.
The quick-thinking youngster was growing frustrated at the amount of time he was having to spend cleaning his mud-caked football boots after games and training – after all, every potential Pokemon-catching second is a precious one these days – and decided that there must be a quicker way.
Arminder was actually 11 when he came up with the Boot Buddy, a handy and extremely portable tool that gets the job done in five minutes with just 300ml of water.
There’s no electricity required and no complicated manual of instructions. You just take care of any thick clumps of mud with the scraper on the back of the Boot Buddy, flip it round and brush away. Like all the best inventions, it will leave you scratching your head as to why nobody has thought of it before.
Arminder impressed the dragons so much with his pitch that he had Deborah Meaden, Peter Jones and Touker Suleyman all battling to be his investor. In the end, after some tough negotiating by his mum, who decided her son might have been given an easier ride on the business side of things due to his age, the three agreed to offer £20,000 each for a 10 per cent share in the company. Not bad for something that had originally been made using no more than a few household objects.
The inventor appeared on Good Morning Britain to discuss his success and demonstrate the product’s ease of use, where he also explained the main reason for its existence: good old-fashioned teenage laziness.
He said: “I always had the problem every week of muddy boots, never cleaning them, always throwing away boots which were perfectly brand new underneath the mud, but I just couldn’t use them.”
He was also quizzed by host Piers Morgan on how he’d spend his first million, should the Boot Buddy be that successful, and promised that most of it would go back to his business partner parents and brother.”I would give the quarter of a million back to my mum and dad first,” he added. “Then I’d buy dad a nice car.”
Arminder’s invention is already available to buy for £14.99 on Amazon, where it has a very respectable four and a half average star rating. Meanwhile, we’re putting the finishing touches to our motorised knee pads. They’re going to be huge.
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