Three years ago, Patrick O’Neill was making the final tweaks on a prototype double-sided camera lens that users could attach to their iPhone 4s.
He would take his product to Kickstarter, still in its early days and well before the online crowdfunder became the premier platform for alternative investments.
In May 2011, the olloclip product and O’Neill’s company—which bears the same name—was launched in a three-minute and 34-second video that featured its fish-eye, wide-angle and macro lens capabilities capturing visitors along Huntington Beach’s iconic strand and pier, as well as images of the city’s surf shops, street signs and restaurants.
The various features gave mobile phone users the ability to build on their creative impulses.
“I’m so glad we chose that route,” said O’Neill, who was among five honorees at the Business Journal’s 13th annual Excellence in Entrepreneurship Awards on March 18 at the Hotel Irvine Jamboree Center.
The Kickstarter campaign raised more than $68,000 from 1,300 backers, shattering its $15,000 goal and putting the startup on the map.
The accessory maker has grown rapidly from its humble beginnings in O’Neill’s kitchen, with sales of more than $11 million annually. The company employs about 50 people in Huntington Beach and its new office in London.
The olloclip now is sold in more than 90 countries through distribution deals with Apple, Best Buy and Target, among others.
The company introduced a four-in-one model in September that also works with the iPhone 4S, 5S and 5C.
Timing has played an important role in the company’s early success and in O’Neill’s life, which was nearly cut short 28 years ago when he was accidentally shot in the head with a .22-caliber rifle during a hunting trip in Riverside with his former brother-in-law.
His brother-in-law’s gun discharged about 5 feet from him as he was walking, and the bullet ripped into his neck. The bullet traveled upward and bounced off his skull before exiting from the back of his head.
He was conscious the entire time. And lucky.
The bullet made a clean entrance and exit. He left the hospital a few hours later in bandages, without a single stitch.
“You learn what’s really important in life in those moments,” said the 48-year-old tech industry veteran. “It gives you clarity.”
Olloclip donates time and a portion of its sales to various charities, including Grind for Life, which helps cancer patients and their families cover transportation costs to doctor visits and procedures, and Tony Hawk’s Stand Up for Skate Parks, which builds skate parks in poor and high-crime neighborhoods.
Opportune Time
Olloclip has benefited from the rise of social networking, smartphone adoption, and content creation using mobile devices, evident in the growing popularity of Instagram and other similar applications.
The confluence of factors, which coincided with the demise of the point-and-shoot digital camera, timed perfectly with the company’s launch.
“We had the right product at the right time,” said O’Neill, an avid photography hobbyist since childhood, a love passed down from his grandparents. “The camera on the iPhone 4 was groundbreaking. Social media was exploding.”
It took O’Neill more than a year and a hundred iterations to develop the product with the use of a 3-D printer to constantly refine prototypes.
He would constantly ask himself if the product was ready for market and if Steve Jobs would sign off on it.
“The answer was always no,” O’Neill said.
He wanted simplicity, a sleek look and a size that could fit into a pocket.
“I think we touched on all those,” he said.
O’Neill literally bet the house on it, taking out a $200,000 equity line of credit on his Huntington Beach home to supplement the Kickstarter funding. The line had dwindled to $5,000 before the business started generating cash flow.
“This had to work,” he said. “I burned the boats on the beach. We bet it all.”
He named the company after the word ollo, which means “eye” in the Galician language of northwestern Spain. The olloclip is like a camera lens, or eye, that clips to a phone.
Olloclip products were shipping across the globe within a month after the Kickstarter campaign, an impressive feat for an upstart company.
O’Neill was planning for success out of the gate and set up a supply chain and distribution network before the product launch, using his experience and connections from a nearly 30-year stint in the technology sector that included running his own product development and hard drive upgrade business for two decades.
It wasn’t long before an Apple representative contacted him about the product. By November 2011, the olloclip was in Apple stores around the world.
“Apple was our first retail customer,” O’Neill said. “Once you have Apple, everything else is pretty easy. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
