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Taking a Chance
Maria gets 10 percent of what Bouncing Brain receives, retail or wholesale, for each Korbie sold (Bouncing Brain gets the rest plus full ownership of the product as part of its standard arrangement with the inventors). As long as Korbies sell, Maria gets paid for 20 years. Korbies can go for $179.99 a pop retail, so Maria’s profits could soar. She says any money from the sales will fund the education of her ten grandkids—and, maybe, a beach house.Prospective inventors usually strut their stuff at one of the regional casting calls held by Bouncing Brain. The judges for Everyday Edisons are open to any idea, whether it’s presented as a notebook drawing or a fully realized prototype. After reviewing some 15,000 ideas from around the country, the Bouncing Brain folks are hard to impress. The most promising concepts are reviewed by Enventys to determine which ones are patent-worthy and whether there’s a market for them. Finally, Bouncing Brain chooses the absolute cream of the crop for the show, less than 1 percent of all the ideas presented.
Brad and Melinda Shepard say if they’d known their odds at the time, they probably never would’ve made the four-hour drive (with two young kids) from their home in Wilmington, North Carolina, to a casting call in Columbia, South Carolina. But they were eager to unveil their creation: a spill-resistant bowl, inspired several years earlier by their messy son, Aidan, then two. Melinda had told Brad she’d dreamed of a bowl that automatically covered the food inside whenever it was tipped. An engineer and inveterate tinkerer, he designed and built such a container. It consisted of two bowls, actually, which rotated on two axes; when tipped, one bowl would gyrate to cover the other.
The Shepards worried that the judges would laugh at their idea. “We expected to be humiliated, like on American Idol,” Melinda says.
At the casting call, attended by more than a thousand, the Shepards had just a few minutes to demonstrate their bowl. The screeners not only treated them kindly but also liked their invention—and asked them to show it again in front of cameras. When the couple learned they’d been selected for the show, they discovered that to get a single Everyday Edisons idea off the ground, the show invests $300,000 to $500,000 (not including production costs for the show) and an average of 1,700 man-hours. “The inventor pays absolutely nothing beyond what they may have spent prior to being accepted for the show,” says Matt Spangard, operations manager for Bouncing Brain. “By assuming the costs of producing the show and the products, we hope to earn a return eventually.”
While the Shepards waited in Wilmington, Enventys faced a snag: When tested among toddlers, one bowl would swivel to cover the other as designed, but “the kids grabbed the bowl while it was open, making the product absolutely useless,” says Ian Kovacevich, Enventys’s head engineer. Back at the drawing board, the Enventys team attached a rim with cutout handles—flying-saucer style—around the bowl. It worked. “The kids grabbed the handles every time,” says Ian.
Bouncing Brain asked Brad and Melinda to come to Charlotte for what the couple thought would be a day of market research. They wound up in a Bed Bath & Beyond, where they were surprised to see their bowl, now named the Loopa, already on the store’s shelves. They were also told their product would be distributed, fingers crossed, in all the Bed Bath & Beyond stores nationwide.
“Early on, we asked ourselves if we should make and market the bowl on our own,” says Melinda, who has an MBA. “Knowing now what it takes, if we had tried, we’d be broke, maybe divorced.” Instead, the Shepards have gained confidence to pursue other ideas. Says Brad, “We have a lot of concepts for new juvenile products!”
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