Consumers : Items No Snap to Market, Inventive Mom Finds
For consumers who think they have the great idea for a new product that fills a need and will make lots of money, entrepreneur Judy Ryder has a tip--it isn’t that easy.
“Every inventor thinks that they’re going to sell their idea and be rich,” said Ryder, 29. “That’s not the way it is. Besides the great idea, you’ve got to have great stamina and a lot of money. And unless you have the support from your friends and family and money, don’t do it.”
Ryder should know. She spent 2 1/2 years getting a product off the ground.
Like other parents of newborns, she thought she had bought everything she would need for her baby. But soon after her daughter, Jessica, was born in fall, 1986, Ryder found herself wishing for a product she couldn’t find, something to keep her baby’s tiny shirt tucked in.
She finally devised the Little Shirt Anchor, small elastic straps that attach to the shirt with plastic garter fasteners and close with Velcro-like ends under the crotch.
Encouraged by family and friends, Ryder, of Woodland Hills, decided to try to sell her product.
“There’s no easy way, no set way to do this,” she said. “I just started calling manufacturers in the phone book. It was an endless process. You end up really out there on your own the whole time.”
Ryder encountered prejudice in her endeavor to start a business, she said: “There’s a lot of bias against women. If you’re working out of your home and you’re a woman, the men don’t want to deal with you. I had one (manufacturer) say, ‘When your husband gets home, have him call me.’ ”
Ryder encountered other problems. She decided, for example, to use plastic rather than metal fasteners and picked out garter grips because she felt they would be tougher for babies to unhook and “I didn’t like the idea of using metal against the skin. . . .” But she used the wrong size garter grip for her product prototype; she then got a bad batch of the items--about 30,000 of them were defective and cracked easily.
“I learned a lifetime of things in 2 1/2 years,” Ryder said. “Now I spend a lot of time counseling other people who call and want to know how to get started in a business. I hear from parent-inventors all the time now. They say the reason they want to do this is to stay home with the kids. I tell them they won’t have much time for the kids.
“Jessica was 7 or 8 months old when I hired my first full-time baby sitter because I didn’t have time. I was too busy getting this off the ground.”
Showing the Product
Once she got her product developed and into production, Ryder said she worked until 1 or 2 every morning and spent weekends showing her product at baby fairs. “I did really well with it at the fairs, so I was really encouraged. But I couldn’t get it going in the stores. I tell people that the smaller the store, the more likely you are to get in a new product.”
Ryder’s mother, Merle Pausch, baby sat for her on weekends while she marketed her product. Her mother and her mother-in-law, Monica Ryder, also invested in her business, because Judy Ryder ran perilously low on money.
“That’s another thing people should know,” she said. “You need X amount to get going, then you need X more every couple of months to keep it going.” She estimates she started business with $2,500 but has put $40,000 to $50,000 in now.
Randy Pausch, her brother and a lithographer, designed her anchor logo. Ryder and her husband, Michael, a former hot-air-balloon pilot who now takes orders and handles the bookkeeping, took their own advertising photographs using their daughter as a model. The shots “weren’t very good, because we aren’t professionals,” Ryder said. The family eventually hired an artist to do an “airbrush drawing, which is what we still use.”
That drawing and other promotional materials are vital, she learned from talking with other inventors and her studies. “The marketing people showed me statistics that said you have 1/20th of a second to attract someone’s eye to a product in a store. That’s why your display is so important.”
‘You Just Can’t Stop’
Ryder added that marketing statistics show that 90% of new products fail. But “I just got more and more determined,” she said. “Once you start something like this, you just can’t stop. . . . There are times when you want to. If somebody had come to the door and said, ‘I’ll give you $10 for the business,’ I would have said ‘Fine,’ and taken it. It was beginning to get to me, like having a 300-pound gorilla in your bathroom.”
Ryder learned about compromise. She first insisted that her product be American-made. But after she stopped sewing them herself, she found that idea impractical; late last year, she contracted for them to be made in Hong Kong. “The biggest expenses were employees,” she said. “And I priced the shirt anchor too low. I was selling it first for $2.50, and after I started hiring people to sew, I ended up selling it for about 12 cents over what it cost me to make.”
Ryder increased the price to $4.95.
She promoted her item in a diaper service newsletter but otherwise found advertising too expensive. She wrote countless pitches to department store chains. Finally, her product got into J.C. Penney stores.
Protecting the Invention
Ryder realized she needed legal assistance when she wanted to trademark her anchor logo and patent her invention. Once again, she turned to the phone book and started calling lawyers. “Most were willing to quote me a price (for services). But then they wanted to schedule an appointment to come in. I didn’t have time right then.”
George Netter, the lawyer she chose, spoke with her for 1 1/2 hours on the phone, Ryder remembered, adding, “I tell people they should ask a lot of questions when choosing an attorney. What kind of accounts they handle, how long they’ve been in practice, how long they’ve been a patent attorney. The ones who don’t answer, you don’t want.”
Ryder said she has two patents on her invention--a design patent and a utility patent. “But just because you have a patent, doesn’t mean people won’t try to rip you off,” she said. “With a sewn product, all they have to do is change a stitch.”
The utility patent, she said, is granted for a new creation or concept and is more work for lawyers. Based on experience and talking with other inventors, she tells them, “it costs between $3,000 and $6,000” for that kind of patent; a design patent, which covers “a new idea for something that already exists,” costs “$500 to $1,000.”
Along the way, Ryder met so many other parent-inventors that she decided to start a catalogue business to advertise their baby products, as well as her own. She promotes her catalogue, with its mailing list of 10,000, as selling “products invented by parents for parents.”
Ryder hopes to spend more time on her catalogue because she just has sold her product for a fee and royalties to A-Plus Products, a local marketing firm. She won’t discuss how much she was paid but made it clear that the money has made her time worthwhile.
“Now, I’m going to be able to pay off my investors,” she said, grinning.
“So many people out there would like to do what I’ve done,” Ryder said. “People don’t realize they can do it. The biggest thing they have to have is patience. Ryder Products is supporting us now, and very well.”
David Ungar, managing director of A-Plus, said he has high hopes for Ryder’s product and is always on the lookout for baby products like it. His company offers a toll-free number for inventors--(800) 359-9955--which Ryder used.
Her product, he said, has the potential of the “Baby Sitter,” a ring that babies sit in for support during a bath. It sold more than 1 million units over seven years, Ungar said, adding, “I expect the shirt anchor to at least equal that.”
NEW AND USEFUL
Colorful bouquet boxes. Page 2.
