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Getting It Out There
When Wendy Hampton, a single mom from Lawrenceville, Georgia, heard about the Everyday Edisons casting call at the nearby PBS station, she decided to go. Years earlier, her ten-year-old daughter, Taylor, announced she was bored, so mother and daughter decided to invent a board game.
“I thought it would be fun to make a game based on idioms, those everyday sayings where the real meaning is different from the literal one, like ‘knock yourself out.’” Wendy says. The game soon became a semi-obsession. Wendy worked on it for the next three years, often getting up in the middle of the night to search for idioms. All told, she collected around 2,500.
That meant putting Enventys’s creative team to work. They added options—drawing, acting, spelling out the phrases hangman-style—to describe the idioms.
Finding a fun name for the game was crucial. The creative team smashed befuddled and idiom together, and Befudiom was born. The game also needed to pop as customers scanned the shelves. Art director Jason Gammon turned common idioms such as “kick the bucket” and “holy cow” into cartoon-like characters for the box’s multicolored design. “Face it, a cow in religious clothing is just plain funny,” Jason says.
The name, the game and the fresh design worked. Dictionary powerhouse Merriam-Webster loved Befudiom and lent its logo and expertise to the project. Befudiom fever caught on as retailers snapped it up.
Wendy will begin receiving royalties in another year, but money is only part of it. “My daughter and I created this together,” she says, “and now it might become something that brings families together.” To Wendy, that would be the ultimate payback.
Turn Your Bright Idea into Big $$$
1. Find out if anyone has a claim to the idea. Do a quick Google or Yahoo search, and check the website of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Look on gadget sites like SkyMall, Brookstone and Hammacher Schlemmer to see if they have anything similar.
2. Research your invention’s viability. Who’s going to buy it and use it? How much would the product cost to make, and how much should you charge? You can begin to get answers by conducting informal focus groups on playgrounds, in malls and in stores that would sell your product.
3. Protect your invention with a patent. Typically, a provisional patent application, good for one year, will cost around $3,000 (including attorney fees) and $15,000 to $20,000 on average for a utility patent, which lasts for approximately 20 years from the filing date. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office holds free seminars across the country for inventors and small businesses on safeguarding your intellectual property. For more information, go to uspto.gov/web/offices/com/iip/index.htm.
4. Beware the helping hand. Before using a firm that promotes inventions, check on its reputation with the local Better Business Bureau or bureau of consumer affairs before signing on. “Inventors are exploited at an alarming rate,” says Enventys CEO Louis Foreman. Don’t be one of them.
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