一夜暴富的典范:来源于橡皮筋游戏灵感的少儿编织机

The hottest tween frenzy this summer isn't a boy band or an excessively priced American Girl doll accessory. It's, well, weaving.
今年夏天最热门的既不是哪一支男子乐团，也不是价格昂贵的美国娃娃玩具，而是编织。

Nine-year-old girls across the U.S. have apparently fallen head over heels for a centuries-old craft form, threading together colorful bracelets with the aid of a makeshift loom. Okay, this time, rubber bands are involved. Lots of them.
全美国九岁的小女孩们都被一种几个世纪以前的工艺所深深吸引。她们在一台临时编织机的帮助下编织着七彩的手链。只是这一次她们要用的是橡皮筋，很多很多的橡皮筋。

Michaels Stores, the huge, private arts-and-crafts retailer, began stocking the $17 Rainbow Loom in the first week of August. The kit is now selling ten times better than the chain's next kids bestseller, says Philo Pappas, Michaels' Executive Vice President of Category Management.
从八月份的第一周开始，手工艺品零售商Michaels Stores便开始引进17美元的彩虹编织机（Rainbow Loom）。如今，Michaels品类管理高级副总裁费罗•帕帕斯称，这款产品的热销程度是该连锁店第二畅销产品的十倍。

Already, a million or so of the rubber-band hand looms have sold through various outlets, according to Cheong-Choon Ng, the product's 45-year-old inventor, who until recently was a senior crash-test engineer for Nissan Motor Co. (NSANY), in Detroit.
据该产品45岁的发明者吴昌俊（音译）透露，这款橡皮筋手织机在多家零售店已经卖出了100万件左右。不久之前，吴昌俊还是底特律日产汽车公司（Nissan Motor Co.）的一名资深碰撞试验工程师。

Three years ago, Ng's two daughters—Teresa, then 12, and Michelle, then 9—were sitting in the family den making bracelets from rubber bands. The process reminded Ng, who grew up in Malaysia, of making jump ropes from rubber bands as a child. Hoping to impress his kids with his bracelet-weaving skills, he grabbed a few tiny elastic bands and tried to mesh them into a pattern. They were too small for his fingers, however.
三年前，吴昌俊的两个女儿——12岁的特蕾莎和9岁的米歇尔——正在家里的小房间用橡皮筋做手链。这个画面让马来西亚长大的吴昌俊想起了用橡皮筋做跳绳的场景。吴昌俊希望能用编手链的水平来打动孩子们，于是他抓起一些橡皮筋，努力想把它们编织成图案。结果他的手太大，而橡皮筋又太小。

So the engineer went to his garage and cobbled together a primitive loom—an old wooden board lined with rows of pushpins. With that, he began looping rubber bands into bracelets. At first his daughters weren't impressed. But once they saw him weaving intricate patterns in breakneck speed, they changed their mind.
于是这位工程师来到自己的车库，拼装出了一台样式古老的织机——其实就是一块旧木板上面钉了几排图钉。凭借这个简单的工具，他开始把橡皮筋缠成手链。最初，他的两个女儿并不感兴趣。但后来，她们看到他飞快地织出复杂的花纹，她们改变了之前的看法。

It was Teresa who saw the potential for transforming this into a business, when other kids in their Novi, Mich., neighborhood began obsessively playing with the looms Dad was assembling. That was when Ng decided to take a leap of faith—guilt-ridden though it was—staking the $10, 000 he managed to save for his daughters' college fund on building a marketable product.
特蕾莎发现了将这个小东西变成商机的可行性。当时她们邻居家的孩子们都开始迷恋爸爸组装的织机。就是在那时候，吴昌俊信心大增——虽然有一点负罪感——他决定把攒出来供女儿上大学的10,000美元拿出来，打造一款可以上市销售的产品。