Sugru

Sugru only launched in December 2009, but every time a new batch is produced it sells out within hours. The Sugru team resist the traditional model of selling to retailers. Instead, they're interacting directly with consumers. They're building a community of people who want to adapt and repair their stuff. They've given out samples throughout the development process (several years long and funded by some impressive investments). They encourage fans to upload pictures and videos of how they've used Sugru. The result is a colourful website that showcases user stories and constantly provides new ideas for using Sugru to entice further purchases. It's innovatively showcasing positive word of mouth rather than hard selling. It helps, of course, that they blog and tweet regularly too. Founder Jane is intent on keeping the team 'small and fun' despite ambitious plans to scale up, recognising 'that's the reason people are connecting with us, so we need to keep that'.

• Sell out within hours every time a new batch is released
• Harnessing full power of online community to market product in a non-aggressive way
• Using user 'stories' rather than hard-selling