June 2010
Abby Appelt
(president of BlingToGo and owner of Out Of The Box Thinking, LLC) helps heal
people by lifting their spirits. Her
ornamental wraps return to ailing people some control of their lives, by
helping them turn their institutional medical equipment into a fashion
statement.
Invention
The Need
Finding
herself on crutches for the fourth time, Ms. Appelt decided to cheer up herself
and her commiserating friends by decorating her crutches. The warm response and good feeling she
received led her to explore ways of extending that benefit to others. Why settle for decorating crutches when you
can also beautify bed rails, canes, IV poles, hospital tables and trays, and
walkers?
The
Solution
A nurse
told Ms. Appelt that any ornamental wrap used in a hospital would have to be
sanitizable and removable, easily and without leaving a residue on the
equipment. So she looked for and found a
suitable commercially available fabric coated with pressure-sensitive
adhesive. She hired a graphic artist to
design decorative patterns based on ClipArt and found two printers to print
chemical-resistant designs on the fabric – one to manufacture up to 2,000 items
per week, and another to fulfill larger orders.
The nurse tested the wraps in a hospital for free and found that
patients liked them. The wraps made
medical equipment uniquely attractive and less frightening.
Product
Development can be costly, but Ms. Appelt showed us how to save money.
Legal
Copyright
Even though
her designs, like all eligible works, automatically received copyright
protection the moment they were created and fixed in a tangible form, Ms.
Appelt decided to register them as a group with the Copyright Office. She read a simple tutorial, filled out a
registration form, and filed it with a $50 fee payment. Registration gave her the option of suing any
infringer and became prima facie evidence of her copyright. Although no international copyright exists
that could protect her designs throughout the world, the U.S. has reciprocal agreements with most
countries (Canada
Patent
Ms. Appelt
hired an attorney to file a provisional patent application for her
invention. That bought her time to
identify her market and to determine whether that market would likely return
enough profit to justify a more expensive nonprovisional patent application and
patent. Her attorney also helped her to
increase her business assets by creating a legal entity that will own any
patent that issues.
Trademark
Legalzoom.com
offers an economical way to get a trademark, but be sure to closely monitor
your application.
Marketing
Elevator
Pitch
You have to
be your own champion if you want your business to succeed. A workshop at Eureka Ranch helped Ms. Appelt
realize the value of an elevator pitch (a 30 second explanation of her wrap for
people she meets). A pitch doesn’t cost
anything and can open unexpected windows of opportunity. She suggested preparing slightly different
variations for different audiences and trying out the pitches on strangers.
Public
Relations
Starting a
business requires a lot of work (12 hour days in Ms. Appelt’s case) and lasts
about 3 years. Rather than spend time
learning and practicing the intricacies of public relations (press releases,
magazine and newspaper articles, social networking, radio interviews, etc.),
she hired a professional (Rachel Jackson) to start and maintain a lively public
conversation about her wrap.
Web Site
Likewise,
Ms. Appelt delegated the design and maintenance of her profitable commercial
website to a professional (Jerri Coverstone).
Why spend your time worrying about domain names, keywords, and Google’s
200 factors for ranking a website when so much else needs to be done? She noted that meaningful links to and from a
website contribute to its rank. So find
websites related to yours by typing key words into the Alexa website, and then
ask the website owners to exchange website links with you.
Revenue Sharing
Revenue
sharing (rewarding another business for bringing you sales) helps Ms. Appelt
turn potential competitors into partners.
This form of marketing is efficient – its cost is directly related to
resulting sales. She displays her wraps
on medical equipment sold by another, and that person displays her medical
equipment wrapped in Ms. Appelt’s designs.
Each pays the other for referred customers. She also uses affiliate marketing (an
internet version of revenue sharing) to increase her profits. She earns a commission each time someone
follows a link from her website to a partner’s website and buys there. In turn, she pays a commission for sales on
her website that originate at a partner’s website. Win/Win – how great is that?
Distribution
Ms. Appelt
bought barcodes (patterns of bars and spaces of varying width that represent
data and can be read by machines) to help track her inventory and to show the
business world that she manufactures and sells.
She paid only $20 apiece by buying the barcodes from a reseller who has
no annual barcode renewal fees (because the UCC, now GS1 US, assigned the
barcodes to the reseller before 8/28/02).
Sales
Manufacturerrepresentatives.com
helped Ms. Appelt create a national network of professional salespeople who
sell her wraps in return for only a commission (15% of the wholesale price;
this percentage is high because the price of her wrap is low). Job advertizements on this website cost her
$30 per month.
Wrap on, Ms. Appelt! Thank you
for sharing your enthusiasm and methods with us. Best of luck with BlingToGo.
Note: Our secretary, Mr. Robert Brand, recommends
the book Inventing for Dummies to new inventors.