5 Ideas for Miniature Promotional Items Kind of Like 'Mug Rugs'

Check out this little coaster that looks like a rug. Isn't it cute? It even has a fun little name: Mug Rugs!

Credit: Amazon

They're all over Amazon, and they come in all sorts of different designs. We love seeing new ways to create a common household product, especially if it lends itself to promotional opportunities. House Beautiful is pretty confident they're the next big thing.

So this got us (me) thinking—what other things can we make smaller to serve other functions?

Here are the fruits of my mental labor:

1. Miniature raft for soap

When you're in the tub, you have two options for the soap. You can either leave it on the tub or soap dish, where it's bound to leave behind some disgusting soap scum. Or, you can let it submerge to the bottom of Davy Jones' Locker. But, picture this: a tiny little inflatable raft, not much bigger than your average bar of soap, floating around with you in the tub. That way the soap is always right there when you need it, you can easily rinse it off, and you can totally slap a logo on that bad boy.

Credit: Getty Images by Alexander Hassenstein

2. Miniature hand-mixer for stirring coffee

The best part about using a hand-mixer for baking is that you actually don't have to do anything with your hands other than hold a button and maybe move the mixer around the bowl a little bit. It's minimal effort. So, what if we take a normal hand-mixer, but shrink it down to a size appropriate to mix cream and sugar into coffee. That way you also save your spoons for when you actually need them!

3. Miniature leather belt for everything you normally use a rubber band for

In our environmentally conscious world, it's vital to find ways to reduce, reuse and recycle. Rubber bands are fine for keeping stalks of celery together, organizing playing cards and more. But, they snap all the time, rendering themselves useless strips of waste. So, what if we started using teeny-tiny little leather belts, complete with adjustable buckle so you can use it on anything? That way, you have a fashionable, #bespoke means of organizing your odds and ends.

4. Miniature chimney sweep brush for phone lint

You don't really see many chimney sweeps by trade these days. But, you see plenty of gunk and pocket lint stuck in the charging port of your smartphone. Using something like a paperclip to dig it out is so primitive, and possibly harmful to the phone. What I'm thinking is we take miniature chimney sweep brushes up in there and get everything out safely. You can sing like Dick Van Dyke in 'Mary Poppins' if you want, but that's optional.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

5. Miniature desktop trash compactor

It's incredible how quickly trash accumulates on a work desk. Small things like candy wrappers, discarded paper and tea bags tend to sit longer than they should because they're so small that you can't justify getting up and taking them to the communal trash can. With a little trash compactor, you can toss these things in when you're done with them, and when it's full you compact them into even tinier cubes of waste. Those little cubes are much easier to carry to the bin, aren't they? You could also have a miniature wood chipper for trash, or a miniature incinerator, but these seem much less safe.

The point here is that finding a useful promotional product is about finding a need in end-users' lives and filling it, ideally with a product that you can put a logo on and that the end-user will hold onto for a long time. Some of these ideas are impractical or haven't yet been created. But what I'm getting at is that, just like Mug Rugs, people want fun takes on existing products that they can look at and go, "Oh, isn't that fun—and also useful on an everyday basis!"

Also, none of these ideas are patented yet (to our knowledge), so go nuts.