Parts of this article reference reporting published by New York Magazine’s Vindicated section in 2016.
Long before VELCRO® Brand fasteners existed, George de Mestral (the innovator behind them) was already inventing. He filed a patent for a toy airplane at age 12. But the idea that changed fastening came in 1941, after burrs clung to his clothes and to his dog’s coat on a hunting trip. Curious about why they held so securely, he studied the burrs under a microscope.
What he found launched years of work to turn that natural mechanism into a manufactured fastener system.
Join us on a journey that explains how de Mestral went from microscope to manufacturing milestones, through patents and naming, to adoption in aerospace and fashion and, finally, his legacy.
- The inventor of VELCRO® Brand fasteners: George de Mestral
- Year the idea began: 1941
- Where were VELCRO® Brand fasteners invented: Switzerland
- How was VELCRO® Brand hook and loop invented? Burrs clinging to animal fur and clothing fibers
- Original patents: Swiss patent issued in 1954 and US patent granted in 1955
- Trademark registration: Swiss trademark registered in 1956, and the US trademark in 1958
- Name origin: from the French words velours (velvet) and crochet (hook)
When Was the VELCRO® Brand Fastener Invented and Who Invented It?
In 1941, George de Mestral was on a hunting trip and noticed that both his pants and his Irish Pointer’s coat were covered in burrs from a burdock plant. Instead of brushing them off and moving on, de Mestral did what great inventors do. He asked one question: why does this work so well?
He examined the burrs under a microscope and saw thousands of tiny hooks. Those hooks latched onto the little loops in his trousers’ fabric and also his dog’s fur. The burr wasn’t using glue or sap—it was using structure.
That insight sparked the core idea behind the VELCRO® Brand’s original fastener. If nature can make a hook and loop connection that closes and pulls apart cleanly, then surely there was a way to manufacture a fastener to do the same thing.
Turning Burrs into Hook and Loop
De Mestral’s idea was simple: replicate the burr mechanism by pairing tiny hooks with simple loops of fabric. Press the two sides together, and the hooks catch the loops, creating a fastener that can open and close again and again.
The hard part came next. Turning tiny hooks and loops into something consistent, durable and repeatable meant solving a manufacturing problem, not just a design problem.
The First Roadblock: Scaling the Hooks
De Mestral visited fabric manufacturing plants across Europe in search of a partner capable of producing his demanding design—many were skeptical of the idea. While the loop side proved relatively easy to weave, the hook side posed a far greater challenge. The hooks had to do two things at once: remain firm enough to hold when pressed together, yet flexible enough to release when pulled apart.
After years of rejection, he found the necessary manufacturing expertise in Lyon, France. There, experimentation led him to nylon, a material with the durability and “memory” required to retain the hook’s shape through repeated use.
With a viable base material identified, de Mestral applied for and received a patent in 1955 and took out a $150,000 loan to continue development. He also founded a manufacturing company, naming it Velcro, a portmanteau of the French words velours (velvet) and crochet (hook).
With these pieces in place, he could finally produce prototype hook surfaces and pair them with a separate woven loop fabric, moving the invention closer to commercial reality.
Turning Prototypes into Production
Proving the concept was only step one. The next challenge was repeatability. Early hooks could only be made by hand, making them slow and difficult to produce at scale.
As money ran out, George de Mestral holed up in a tiny cabin in the village of Commugny in the Swiss Alps, determined to solve the problem. The issue lay in the hooks themselves: the material was woven as a loop, but each loop had to be cut at a precise angle to function properly, a process that was extremely difficult to control.
The breakthrough came with a cutting method inspired by barbers’ clippers. By maintaining a consistent cutting angle, de Mestral could finally design a loom capable of producing uniform hooks. Nearly twenty years after his initial brainstorm, that precision made it possible to mass‑produce hook and loop fasteners.
Patents and the Name
As the system matured, patent milestones followed in the 1950s, including his first patent, issued in Switzerland in 1954, and a US patent granted in 1955.
Not an Instant Hit, but a Durable Idea
Even after it reached the market in the early 1960s, hook and loop fasteners were slow to catch on. Manufacturers struggled to understand the purpose of such an unfamiliar system. They were accustomed to buttons, zippers or permanent stitching, and many questioned why they should change. It seemed possible that de Mestral’s invention, like so many before it, would be dismissed as interesting but ultimately impractical.
Then NASA came along. While searching for a way to keep objects secured to walls in zero gravity, the agency discovered the VELCRO® Brand fastener system. Suddenly, de Mestral’s hook and loop invention was no longer an oddity. It was space‑age. It was cool.
By the mid‑1960s, hook and loop fasteners began appearing in clothing, including high fashion. French designer Pierre Cardin embraced the material, helping propel it into the mainstream. With that cultural shift, de Mestral’s invention was officially a hit.
Beyond Hook and Loop: De Mestral’s Legacy
George de Mestral’s story is a reminder that innovation does not always start with a grand plan. Sometimes it starts with irritation, curiosity and the willingness to look closer. Velcro Companies continues to build on that same mindset, drawing inspiration from the natural world to solve demanding industrial challenges.
De Mestral passed away in 1990 in Commugny, where his breakthrough first took root. He had long sold the rights to his creation to Velcro Companies, then moved on to other ideas, including a very successful asparagus peeler. Still, his lasting imprint is clear. VELCRO® Brand hook and loop fasteners began as burrs that would not let go, then became a repeatable, reliable closure that found its way from everyday life to the moon and beyond.
FAQs
Swiss engineer George de Mestral invented VELCRO® Brand hook and loop fasteners. He got the idea after burrs from burdock plants clung to his clothes and his dog’s fur.
The idea began in 1941, but it took years to develop. De Mestral filed for Swiss patent protection in 1951, and his first Swiss patent was issued on March 16, 1954.
De Mestral wanted to turn nature’s “grab and release” design into a reusable closure that people could open and close again and again. After seeing how burr hooks latched onto fabric loops and fur, he worked to replicate that same concept with manufactured materials.
Not exactly. The spark came from an everyday annoyance, burrs stuck to clothing and fur, but the invention itself was deliberate. De Mestral intentionally studied the burrs, tested materials and methods and spent years refining the design so it could be made consistently.
VELCRO® is a trademark identifying products made by Velcro Companies—it is not the generic name for the technology. The general term is “hook and loop fastener.”
NASA did not invent the hook and loop fastener. George de Mestral invented the technology, and NASA later popularized its use by relying on VELCRO® Brand fasteners to secure items in weightlessness during the space race and Apollo era.
