Wine Saver on an official Dutch stamp

11 february 2010

It has been 100 years since the Dutch Patent Act came into operation. For this occasion, minister Van der Hoeven from the Dutch Economics Department and Gerard Kleisterlee, CEO of Philips, have requested the formation of a set of stamps. TNT, the Dutch postal company, has granted this request and made a set of ten different stamps representing divers old and modern Dutch inventions. The official issue took place on Thursday February 11th in the Art Hall Rotterdam.

The stamp designer, Theo Peters from Comma-S, was challenged by the assignment and looked at both the visual attractiveness of the inventions and the way it triggered people’s imagination. He thought it important to place both recent and old inventions on the stamps.

The designer asked International Innovation Company if we wanted to participate with our Wine Saver. We consider this a huge honour and recognition of our organisation as an “invention factory”. Since the start of our organisation, we have marketed a huge amount of patented product, of which the Wine Saver was the first and is the most widely known.

The Wine Saver makes sure that wine in an opened bottle stays fresh for longer, by taking out the air with the vacuum pump. The grey background drawing taken from the original patent, shows the way the vacuum pump and rubber stoppers work. The Wine Saver was first patented in 1987. Since then, the design of the Wine Saver has been adjusted by adding a click-system which allowed us to prolong the patent. The Wine Saver is a very useful product and millions have been sold worldwide.