Woman’s inventing experience reveals production, design and expense challenges
After your first year or two, when sales appear to be at their peak, approach manufacturers who have a product line in which your product would fit.
BY JACK LANDER
Like most other women, Kieu Phan was disgusted with the tangled mess after she washed her bras with other clothes in her vertical-drum washing machine.
The bra straps hooked onto the clothes. She was sure there had to be a better way.
In 2000, she invented the BraBall—a two-piece, hinged, plastic ball with 308 openings that allowed soapy and rinse water to flow
freely but keep the straps inside the ball.
A flash of trouble
She described her invention to a plastic injection-molding vendor as having two critical dimensions: the overall maximum diameter of 6 1/2 inches, and the rectangular hole diagonal dimension of 1/2 inch maximum.
The overall diameter was based on the minimum clearance between the agitator and the drum of popular brands of top-loading washers. The hole dimensions were based on the size of the typical hardware used to latch the bra straps.
The result of the first molding was a thing of beauty and pride for Kieu and her husband, Toan. But the usual “first article” generally has a few, often hidden, problems that must be addressed before marketing, and Bra-Ball had its share.
First, and obvious, was abundant “flash.” That’s the term for the tissue-paper-thin plastic that leaks out between the halves of the mold when the hot liquid plastic is forced into the mold under about 30.000 pounds per square inch of injection pressure.
The flash appeared within many of the rectangular openings. Kieu quickly discovered the proper tool for its elimination was the Exacto-knife. Early on, she personally de-flashed every BraBall sold.
She tried to delegate this operation to employees, but none lived up to her high standard of “no flash” on the shippable product. After several attempts, she hired a young woman who was proficient at this.
Fine-tuning the design
Next was the latch design. This is when I entered the scene.
Operating the latch was too stiff for finger comfort. I made two or three dimensional changes before reaching a compromise between easy-to-open and secure latching during the pounding that Bra-Balls get from the agitator in top-loading machines.
Then, there was the stainless-steel hinge-pin retention.
We had assumed that friction alone would have prevented the pin from migrating out of its long hole but soon discovered the pounding of a top-loading machine’s agitator gradually worked the pin out after several washings. We solved this by heating a small amount of the waste flash and plugging the hinge-pin hole with the molten blob, using a small soldering-iron.
The last major problem was that the opposing halves of the BraBall did not always fit properly together. This suggested the molder had ejected the parts before the mold was sufficiently cooled by its water jacket, thereby allowing the weight of the parts in the bin to which they were placed after ejection to distort the parts on which they rested.
I solved this by heating the unassembled halves at a certain temperature and time in an ordinary kitchen oven. The parts had sufficient “memory” from their molding stage and relaxed back to their precise intended shape.
I also designed and built foot-pedal-operated machines for processing certain assembly operations.
Cash flow, competition issues
Finally, Kieu began shipping BraBalls, some days as many as 100. Sales grew quickly due to word of mouth, and the enormous expense of the mold, patents, and inventory was being slowly paid off.
A clear profit appeared to be on the distant horizon. But one nagging problem remained. The 6-1/2-inch diameter, which was the largest that BraBall would fit safely in top-loading washers, did not accommodate bra-cup size C and larger.
Kieu was missing selling to a substantial segment of the market, but she didn’t have the money for a larger mold at this point. This also meant informing would-be customers of the size limits, and returning
money to those who had not read about the size limits before ordering.
Also, around the end of her second year of sales, she began to face competition. The copycats were generally functionally inferior to BraBall, but of course buyers wouldn’t know the competition’s faults until they bought and used it.
And Kieu was still paying to file foreign patents, which added to her total patenting costs of close to $80,000—including patent attorney
fees, filing fees and periodic maintenance fees.
Patent maintenance fees are expensive and due at 3 1/2, 7 1/2 and 11 1/2 years after issue. Even for a micro-entity such as Kieu’s, the total fees for a utility patent maintenance is more than $3,000 in the United States.
Kieu soon discovered that future costs necessary to maintain her patents and acquire a second mold for bra-cup size C and larger—which would fit and operate safely only in front-loading machines—were much higher than anticipated. And her resources for borrowing were
already stretched to their limit.
Meanwhile, new BraBall copycats seemed to appear on Amazon.com every week or so. (As I am writing this column, I count 17 copies in molded plastic and a few others in shaped, mesh-bag
forms.) Year by year, Kieu’s costs increased and her sales volume dropped due to competition.
Competition? Isn’t that what patents are intended to prevent?
Well, yes, if you have the money for a patent attorney to analyze your competitor’s products to determine if they are infringing your patents—and if so, prepare and file lawsuits against them.
Suppose the infringer is in Europe. Will you have the patience and money to hire a second attorney in Europe? And what if the infringer wins? One such suit could cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Remember these takeaways
I spoke with Kieu on the phone in early March. She freely admitted that her approach to setting up her business was backwards.
She should have saved or borrowed enough money before her startup to pay for both molds, one U.S. patent, and the first year’s rent and utilities for a shop in which she could produce BraBalls.
And now, with 20-20 hindsight, I suggest the following for any inventor who has dreams of producing an invention by himself or herself:
- In general, unless you are wealthy or financed by an investor, forget foreign patenting. The manageable and profitable market is here in the United States. Don’t go broke trying to protect what you can’t afford to defend. Always think of your patent as an expensive license to sue, and invest your foreign patent money in startup items such as the second mold so that you can accommodate the larger sizes from the beginning., and also have a complete product line for licensing.
- Pay only the first (3-1/2-year) patent maintenance fee, which was $400 in her case. When the second fee is due, assess your competition. If you have several competitors, or even two or three, ask yourself if the cost of suing infringers is more than you’ll probably recover if you sue and win. Lawsuits outside the United States may be great for large companies but fatal for the small companies.
- We have a tendency to feel more like parents than entrepreneurs toward our inventions; we want to hold onto them forever. But after your first year or two, when sales appear to be at their peak, approach manufacturers who have a product line in which your product would fit. These companies are your licensee candidates. In other words, create a sales-attractive product, and avoid the stage wherein the product inevitably becomes a money loser and eventually obsolete for one reason or another. The large company with several products can keep the group of products profitable by adding new products as older ones decline and eventually are dropped. (The small producer, usually not so easily.)
I’m not saying that all ventures will have the same or even similar problems that Kieu and Toan experienced, but it’s not a unique model, either.
Make sure you think through the startup and early growth before you commit your capital. And make sure you have much more capital than you think will be sufficient.