Editor’s note: This article spotlights Angus Willows, founder and CEO of Kangaroo, a winner of the 2023 Upgrade with Wix contest. Winners were announced in January 2024 and won a business update, courtesy of Wix.
Some things in life are easy to take for granted. Hangers are one of them. When a hanger works well and keeps our clothes snugly in place, then we hardly pay attention to them. But when a hanger fails to do its job and our closets suffer for it—well, then we notice.
Angus Willows first noticed his hangers in college. With only 10 hangers to his name, then-19-year-old mechanical engineer student Angus felt the frustration of watching his clothes slip off their plastic rods, or worse, seeing hangers break under the weight of everyday use.
Before long, he found himself putting his engineering hat on—and alas, the first iteration of the Kangaroo hanger was born.
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Uncovering the wasteland of hangers
Most of us probably know as much about hangers as we do about kangaroos. In those early days, Angus was about to discover more flaws in the hanger industry than meet the eye.
Turns out that the hanger industry is outrageously wasteful. By measure of one internet sleuth, coat hangers of any type (be it wooden, wire or plastic) are not accepted by 99% of local recycling programs.
“I think a crazy number—over 8 billion hangers per year—end up in a landfill,” says Angus. And that’s only an estimate. If you were to google this today, you’d find estimates jumping into the teens if not higher. Or, as one retail blog eloquently put it, “an amount that could fill the Empire State Building 20 times over.”
What most manufacturers struggle to do these days is find a design and material that are both perfectly priced and perfectly durable. The common plastic hanger, for example, is often made of polystyrene (“which is essentially Styrofoam that’s compressed,” explains Angus to us non-engineer minds), polycarbonate and/or a mixture of other plastics.
This makes it significantly cheaper to produce—“You could sell these at the dollar store and still make somewhat of a profit,” says Angus. Unfortunately for the earth, these plastics are often too costly to recycle and leach toxic chemicals when they degrade.
On the other hand, the popular “velvet” hangers use glue, flocking (synthetic fibers) and metal, which makes them nearly impossible to recycle. The only recyclable bit: the acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) that makes up its bone structure, but this, too, is rendered unrecyclable once the glue and flocking are slapped on.
This was just the tip of the iceberg. As Angus came to find, the hanger industry was grappling with a serious environmental crisis.
Sustainable by design
You could say Kangaroo’s mission came before the product; sustainability is at the core of both the product idea and design.
“The beauty of the Kangaroo hanger is that I designed it in a way so that it’s single material,” explains Angus, “and that’s super important for recycling. Otherwise, the materials have to be separated in some way for it to be recyclable.”
The material in use? ABS. Yes, that ABS. The same material you find inside velvet hangers that give it strength and durability. The original “Hangaroo” by Kangaroo features unadulterated ABS in all its glory.
“This is 100% recycled ABS,” says Angus about the Hangaroo. “ABS is also what LEGOs are made of [and] I wouldn’t be surprised if these hangers are partially made out of LEGOs because our manufacturer sources these recycled materials from all over.”
ABS is accepted by most recycling centers, according to Angus, and in the municipalities that don’t take ABS, he hopes to set up a recycling program.
“The goal of this is that you won’t ever have to recycle this because it’s so strong and it lasts forever. But if you do need to, it’s recyclable…I could recycle this hanger five times and it would still have essentially the same properties as it has right now.”
Leaping into final design and patenting
Today, the Kangaroo hanger is built with both mission and function in mind.
It has a thicker, more resistant structure than many of its predecessors. If you look closely, you’ll see that the hanger resembles the I-beam of a building, which gives it its sturdiness.
It’s also designed to hold all types of clothes in place without wrinkling or tugging the fabric. You can hang a collared shirt without buttoning anything up. You can store a strappy top without relying on hooks that snag on other clothing. It is definitively an all-purpose hanger.
Of course, such a design requires protection. “I knew I needed to patent it because if I didn’t have a patent when I started selling it, then it wouldn’t be worth it,” recalls Angus.
“I had this ‘Patent It Yourself’ book that I bought on Amazon,” he adds, referring to this 624-page guide by David Pressman, which he scrupulously studied. Together with a patent attorney, the young inventor filed for his first patent. And thus began his pursuit of turning his idea into a business.
The TikTok that changed it all
If you go to Kangaroo’s TikTok account, you’ll find a mix of videos featuring product demos (including an inventive “Can it hang?” series) and business lessons (“Come write a patent with me” invites Angus in another video).
But, perhaps the most notable of these is a video from 30 days into Angus’s TikTok venture.
“This is my invention, and I hope it completely changes the billion-dollar hanger industry that produces millions of tons of waste every year,” a fresh-faced Angus says on screen, holding up one of his earliest models.
The video was a smashing success. Within the first few hours, it amassed a hundred thousand views. The next morning, it had 2 million.
“It was life-changing. It was totally life-changing,” says Angus, who still lights up at the memory of viewers flooding his inbox. The video now sits at 7.2 million views—second to another video that the founder posted two days later that exceeded 17 million views.
“By some grace of luck, I had my website already set up”—(on Wix, we might add)—“and I had preorders available.”
The money from those preorders afforded Kangaroo’s first production run. This included months of molding, testing, manufacturing and shipping the final products. By the following January, the hangers were in buyers’ hands, and “people absolutely loved them.”
“My initial thought [behind TikTok] was maybe I can show people this invention and they’ll like it, and they’ll give me ideas on how to make it better. Maybe there will be someone who’s also better at business than I am and can give me some advice.”
Where Kangaroo hangers are headed in the long jump
The Hangaroo hanger is available for purchase online via Amazon and the Kangaroo site. It comes in four playful colors: charcoal, tangerine, pinkity and oakmilk.
The next move for Angus? Taking Kangaroo into new territories. New product lines. New partners. Additional R&D. Manufacturing closer to home.
But no matter how the business evolves, one thing remains true: the business exists to make a difference. “I’m not about selling products. I want this to be a wake-up call for a lot of industries…to get people thinking what other industries are like this and how can we create something that’s better for the planet and better for people.”
The call for change has earned Kangaroo plenty of fans already. In the words of Vogue:
“Kangaroo Hanger’s conscious effort to consider material choice and design while addressing functional needs gives home and commercial users a guilt-free alternative. With this, the Kangaroo hanger is the first hanger worthy of Vogue.” - Vogue UA (2024)
Lessons from Angus
Founders, take note: entrepreneurship is rarely what many of us imagine it to be. It usually starts with a great idea—or perhaps multiple good ideas, of which, only a few make for okay businesses.
If you’re interested in becoming an entrepreneur, remember these words of wisdom:
Know your why: “There were many times when I was discouraged and wanted to just get a normal job. [But if I could go back in time,] I would tell my younger self, don’t be discouraged…If you’re really doing something that you love and that you’re passionate about, you’re going to do something great…and there are an infinite number of opportunities that come with something great, even if they don’t come right away.”
Write every idea down: “I think I see design flaws in stuff. Like with the hanger, I saw it and I thought, ‘Really?’...My brain starts working out ways to fix it on its own…then a couple of days down the road, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with an idea and I’ll write it on my phone. I’ll investigate the next morning [and see] whether it was worth anything.”
Learn from doing: “[There are] really random, weird things that you gotta just figure out…there are so many roadblocks that are always happening every single day in every aspect: product design, financial, growth, social media—everything.”
Use the right tools from the get-go: “One of the reasons why I love Wix and chose Wix for my website: it’s a whole business tool. You can handle everything on there for your whole business—it’s crazy. The thing that I loved about it over all of the other platforms out there is that you’re able to customize everything on your website so that it’s really yours…The way that I was able to customize the site made it both easy for people to understand the product but also easy to preorder.”
Read also: How to make a website
Expect success to look different: “When I was growing up and I had all of these inventions…I always thought that it could potentially take years—10, 20 years—until something life-changing happened. But I kept on pushing towards that…A lot of the time, success and stability don’t come until far down the road. Far after you think that it’s going to come.”
Accept help and seize opportunities: “There’s so much money that’s required to start a business and really get things running…Thanks to the Upgrade with Wix contest, we were not only able to create a new product…but we were also able to get a ton of new inventory in the 100% recycled, heavy-duty hanger…that upgrade was one of the main factors that kept us afloat and kept us moving towards the direction we want to be moving.”
Read about our other Upgrade with Wix winners: