Recycler Trade Magazine (October 2004)

Hip Ink Pte Ltd Perspective

I met James Tan and Ong Wooi Siang of Hip Ink in their Cecil Street office in the heart of Singapore's financial district. Theirs is a relatively young compang and when I met them it was on the brink of releasing a whole portfolio of innovative products about which the two of them are, understandbly, very excited.

Driven by a desire to release a product that was different from anything else on the market the two of them have undergone a steep learning curve to arrive where they are today. Their product has metamorphosed alongside them as they have learnt more about the market and what works well and adapted their strategy accordingly.

It all began around the time of World Expo in 2003 when the company had just started feeling its way with making its first machine, which was planned to be on a fairly large scale and similar to those already made by Oliser, CBR and R-Jet Tek. The two of them travelled to Las Vegas hoping the show would give them some insight into the market. It did and having learnt a lot at the show they decided to scale down somewhat.

By the time they took their product to the Remax trade show in April 2004 it had changed before the inké machine was released, the company appeared at Remax with a product that was not dissimilar in concept to the inké machine (albeit with the capability for refilling coloured cartridges too). The two of them spole to a lot of people at Remax and came away with a lot of comments and advice that they started to try and capture in further development of their product.

Following Remax they decided to go down the refill kit path - working purely on refills for inkjet cartridges. They believe that refill kits are attractive to users as the cost of cartridges is so exorbitant, though they felt that thus makers of refill kits had been unimaginative in approach, leaving ample room for innovation within this market.

Around this time the two also made a discovery that was to help them dramatically in shaping their product. James took a cartridge to a renowned refilling franchise and was initially impressed with the results. However, three days later the cartridge stopped working. This led him and his partner to believe that an underlying weakness with refilling is that any ink remaining within a cartridge once it has been spent can interfere with the cartridge's internal workings if it is later refilled. This causes the cartridge to fail before you get to the end of the (refilled) ink.

On discovering this they went into remanufacturing/refilling forums on the web and investigated a report conducted by Lyra research. These sources confirmed the existence of such a problem. The two of them also decided that existing refill kits did not have an effective priming solution to deal with the airlock that commonly occurs within these cartridges.

Their response to these problems came in the form of a refill kit consisting of three major components - HipFill™ prime, HipPrime™ and HipClear™ fill (pictured) all of which offered an innovative solution to a perceived problem with existing refill kits.


A selection of Hip Ink products
The first product in the kit - HipFill - aimed to address an accusation often levelled at refill kits - that they are messy and complicated to use. This they attributed to the fact that existing kits tend to give users a fixed volume of ink to put into their cartridge. This is problematic because when you refill a cartridge you do not necessarily know how much ink is already inside. This is especially true of colour cartridges, where the cartridge's use of ink is not consistent across the colours and there is likely to be a residue of at least one colour. Putting a set quantity of ink into a cartridge that already has some ink in it effectively over-fills the cartridge, causing a messy overflow of ink.