Well, Here's the Most Ridiculous Product Any Agency Has Ever Made

Sure, your agency has made some dumb things over the years. But have you ever made a rubber scrotum for office workers to hang under their desks and give a friendly squeeze now and then, to relieve stress? Didn't think so. Imaginarte, an agency in Spain, has. And is proud of it. The product is called NiceBalls. The tagline is, "Be productive whilst you touch your balls." It's described on the Kickstarter as "a hanging prosthetic accessory that can be stuck to your work desk in a simple, discrete and efficient way." Yeah, looks real discrete: [kickout id="1"] The rubber scrotum actually has two balls inside that move around. So, NiceBalls are essentially a genital-ized version of Baoding balls. It started out as a project during "a working day of internal motivation," agency rep Almudena Richart tells us. But now they're going into production, after 772 people gave €31,423 (more than $36,000) to the NiceBalls Kickstarter. Richart explains that NiceBalls actually came out of a pun. "NiceBalls is inspired by the popular Spanish expression 'Touch the balls,' which means 'Doing nothing,'" she says. "What you miss most when you return from vacation is precisely 'touching the balls.' It does not matter if you're a man or a woman: We all need to do it. It is the best way to deal effectively with the accumulated work and tension of the first few days back. So we set out to come up with a fun solution to the problem." It's hard to tell whether this is a cultural thing—maybe, in the local Spanish market, Niceballs aren't as weird and inappropriate as they seem. Or maybe the agency can't help but try to capitalize on a clearly successful Kickstarter for a product that was just meant to be a joke. Here's a little promo video they put together: [kickout id="2"] Either way, they're doubling down on it, happily telling inspiring Niceballs stories like the locally sourced labor for production. "The easiest thing would have been to take production to China or to sell the idea directly," says Lucia de la Vega, Imaginarte's strategy director. "However, the project was born in Alicante and we decided to call on the companies in our immediate environment in order to improve our initial design and to outline the details of the production. We are lucky to have close to us a professional and very capable toy industry." Imaginarte director Antonio Piñero adds: "It was the people who encouraged us to move from storytelling to storydoing, and to press ahead in an environment that has forced us to evolve and learn at full speed. Developing a product that meets our expectations is not easy, especially when we did not plan to make it happen at first. However, we decided to leave common sense aside and … make the business work." On the common sense issue, we can agree. Though Richart says don't knock it until you try it. "Its elastic touch, and the two mini balls that move smoothly inside, give very good vibes," she says. "An almost therapeutic feeling."

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Well, Here's the Most Ridiculous Product Any Agency Has Ever Made

Imaginarte squeezes 'NiceBalls' to life

Tim Nudd

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Tim Nudd