Aim

Products of Mass Construction

The Need

The world needs 21st Century buildings

Up till now we humans have not really improved on 10,000 year old technology… the brick

Global Flooding

Water levels are rising and we need a quick and simple defence system.                                                          

Plastic Pollution

We make the most throwaway things out of the most imperishible of materials… plastic. What if we recycle it into something permanent?

The Solution

Using these 4 BASIC PARTS parts we can build pretty much anything.

TO SEE HOW IT WORKS, JUST WATCH OUR  VIDEO

The story so far…

Whilst at work one day my old boss was trying to think of additional uses for a new piece of bagging equipment he'd just purchased. His idea was manufacturing reuseable sandbags for flood defences.

A good concept, but it soon became apparent that while the reusable idea was great, you still had to figure out how to join the sandbags together if you want build a watertight wall.

He'd arrived at the age old construction problem of horizontal and vertical Integration...

So how do you build a lifesize wall without using something to glue or hold identical parts together?

This problem kept going round in my head and I quickly realised that building upwards is easy – thanks to gravity – as you can easily stack things. But joining pieces sideways was, as we were soon to find, the 'Holy Grail' of building conundrums.

A good friend of mine, Graeme Wilkinson of 6e Creative and I worked on a lot of solutions… but none of them were quite perfect.

By this point I'd moved jobs… but the obsession had got the better of me.

So we hired a team of industrial designers, E3 Design in Newcastle and following months of hard work, many design changes and numerous 3D printed prototypes… WE CRACKED IT… a wall with no connectors or joining agents.

And once we'd figured out how to build a simple straight wall the improvements just kept flowing.

• We could make corners.
• Fit windows and doors
• We could fill the wall with everything from concrete blocks to batteries.
• We also had the ability to run cables and pipes unobstructed through the walls.
• Also attach a roof and a floor

All from 4 basic parts and, in most cases, with no tools.

The scope of the things we could build was massive

• Flat pack houses
• Flood defences
• Internal walls in existing buildings
• Humanitarian shelters
• …even floating homes!

We knew this was big so we had a patent search done by Bailey Walsh in Leeds and found that nothing remotely like this had ever been patented world wide….brilliant!     

So we filed a UK informal patent followed by a Worldwide PCT.

So what next?

Simply put… ‘Build it and they will come.’

We’ve done all the testing we can do with 3D modelling, computer simulation and prototypes so we’ve now got to build for real. Which involves the following steps:

1. Finalise supplier partners
2. Make production tools
3. Run test batches 
4. Testing
5. Accreditation (where applicable)

We are already in discussions with a number of extrusion companies in the UK and Europe and we anticipate stages 1 to 4 taking six months. Where the application requires accreditation (for example internal walls) it will likely take a further six months.

Running alongside this work are many other marketing, customer and administration activities in preparation to start selling OGEL.

VOOM 2018

We need to start showing the world what we do – and what better platform than VOOM 2018?

It would be great to win a prize but we hope for so much more:

PRODUCT FEEDBACK We think OGEL's a really cool product but we'd love to hear about improvements and other ideas from as wide an audience as possible.

CREATE A FANBASE When we start selling, we'd like to have a ready made group who are interested in buying. Or who would like to contribute to our less commercial elements such as humanitarian shelters.

FUNDING We'd like to have as wide a group of investors as we can. Big and small, VOOM is a brilliant way to start finding them.

A vote and/or a pledge would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for looking at our pitch.

Gary Giles

Founder

This project successfully funded on 15th May 2018