Happy April Fool’s! Here at Red Badger, we spend our days creating and building transformative digital products for all kinds of consumer problems - that’s not a joke. With our playful spirit in mind, we thought we’d create a list of 12 of our top picks of April Fool’s products over the years.

1. Lego - Find My Brick

Starting strong, in comes Lego with their Brick Finder app. By just scanning over a pile of miscellaneous bricks, the app finds the exact shape and colour brick you’re looking for. Announced over Twitter last year as a prank, there have been many calls to make it the real deal. Can you imagine your Lego life with the Brick Finder? Oh, the ease.

2. Google - Google Wind

In 2017, Google published the above ad for Google Wind in Holland. As it rains 145 days a year there, Google Wind promises to deliver clear skies for everyone by controlling the weather with machine learning that recognises cloud patterns and orchestrates a network of windmills to blow the rainclouds away. A neat idea, can they do that for the UK too?

3. Ikea - Erroneous Left-Handed Allen Key

This one was favoured by our Product Designers for its simple genius. The beauty of this April Fool’s product is that at first glance, the notice seems legitimate. An allen key that only works for left-handed people would be quite problematic for all those right-handed people out there. However, if you just flip the erroneous left-handed allen key in your hand, as if by magic it turns into the right-handed correct allen key - wow.

4. Ted Baker - Bluetooth Adjustable Heels

Ted Baker came up with a never-before-seen technology enabling the wearer to change the height of their heels with a Bluetooth-enabled slider function in the Ted Baker app. For our fellow heel-lovers out there who know the regret of putting on those 6-inch stilettos after 4 hours, we know there’s definitely a market for this one.

5. HERE - Papyrus

The HERE Papyrus is one of the more futuristic products on our list. Combining their HERE Maps with a physical ‘papyrus’ and AR enables the wearer to see digital landmarks, restaurants and much more. We certainly don’t think this is too far off as a real piece of technology, so watch this space in a couple of years.  

6. Marmite - Clear Marmite

Although we don’t make physical products here at Red Badger, we can’t deny, this is a great April Fool’s product. Going deeper into the matrix, if they made it, it would be an even better April Fool’s prank for the unassuming Marmite hater.

7. Samsung - ExoKinetic

Now, this is something we know many of us wish was a real product. The Samsung ExoKinetic was a compact device you plug into your smartphone to kinetically charge it on the go. The simple design and genuine use of the product shows Samsung knows how to create a great product with consumers in mind, which begs the question, why haven’t they made it yet?

8. Houzz - Hide From My Room

A simple but very comical entry from Houzz in 2017. Those old threadbare furnishings getting in the way of your feng shui? Just blast them out of sight to get that aesthetic right. (We highly recommend having the sound on for this one).

9. T-Mobile - ONEsie

Why have a wearable that only goes around your wrist, when you can have full-body wearable technology with the T-Mobile ONEsie that tracks your every biomechanic? With a comical ad, and 4 different versions to suit different occasions (the pink work suit is our favourite), T-Mobile hit the nail on the head here.

10. Lyft - Mono Ride Hailing Wearable

Speaking of wearables, back in 2017, Lyft came out with a new wearable for your hand that hails cabs by just sticking out your thumb to autonomously call them. They actually made a few prototypes that were handed around San Francisco which not only hailed the cab, but also intensified flashing lights the closer your Lyft got. Definitely dance-worthy, for sure.

11. Lego Vacuum Sorter

Lego makes another entry on this list because they just keep getting it right. Ideating a revolutionary new vacuum cleaner that just vacuums up those pesky bricks and pops them out perfectly sorted by colour and shape, it’s seriously handy. Really, don’t say you don’t want it.

12. Google - Screen Cleaner

The last on our list attempts to break the 4th wall of digital to physical products. Screen Cleaner is an app by Google that promises to clean physical smudges and dirt from your screen. Now we all know Google can create some cool products, but we’re not quite sure this one is possible in the realms of our laws of physics.