A Fidlock buckle snapping home, a rigid gift box sighing shut, a cabinet door that opens to a push — consumer products discovered that a designed magnetic closure is a feeling customers remember and copywriters can’t fake.
This is the volume end of designed magnetics: unglamorous, high-count, margin-sensitive — and the place where “feel” is a purchasable differentiator. It is also where the next thousand coded-magnet design wins are most likely to hide, because the parts are cheap enough to redesign on a whim.
Fidlock’s fasteners — on helmets, bags, shoes — combine magnetic attraction (finds and seats itself, one-handed, eyes-free) with a mechanical lock that carries the structural load. Magnet for the guidance, mechanism for the strength: the honest division of labor.
Sugatsune, Häfele and the furniture-hardware world ship magnetic touch latches by the million: press the door, the latch ejects it. A coded push-latch does this in the magnet itself — repel-then-snap printed as a force profile.
The rigid box with the softly accelerating lid is now the default premium unboxing. The closure force curve — how it gathers, seats, resists reopening just slightly — is the product experience’s first second.
Magformers, Geomag and kin use rotating spherical or multi-pole magnets so pieces always attract — the earliest mass-market lesson in engineered magnet behavior. Fullerton’s own origin story was a self-assembling toy for his grandchildren.
Modular furniture that keys itself — panels that only accept the correct connector, aligned by the magnet, no tools, wrong assembly physically rejected. The joining category is real and shipping; the coded-keyed version is not confirmed.
Brands tune sounds and haptics; a printed force curve makes the closure’s hand-feel tunable the same way — a snap profile as recognizable as a startup chime. No confirmed shipping example.
The catalogue is sorted by what the magnet has to do — hold, align, latch, turn, resist a sideways pull — because that is what you know when you start looking. If nothing there fits, describe the job and we will tell you honestly whether it can be done.
Browse by behaviour Describe the job