Inventor need quick sales to launch a product

By Don Debelak

How is the inventor doing today

{Don Debelak’s new book, Turning Your Invention into Cash is now available on Amazon for $3.49. Go to Amazon.com and enter inventions Don Debelak to purchase. From the author of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Bringing Your Product to Market.}

This article first appeared in Entrepreneur magazine in the early 2002

Note:  Check out the company web site at http://www.everywherechair.com/  They have develop a small business business that thrives to this day.  From their website: 

Everywhere Chair started as a family business selling our handmade chairs at craft shows in 1990 and continues today as a family business, although our product line has greatly enlarged. We are located in the mountains of Western North Carolina in the small town of Burnsville. My name is Jim Ludwig and, together with my wife, Mary Sheldon, own and operate Everywhere Chair LLC. Our Office Manager, Kathryn Lynch, is in charge of processing your orders and heads up Customer Service. EverywhereChair.com started in 2000 with a store built on BigStep.com, one of the first ecommerce platforms. Feeling a need for a more functional and secure store, Everywhere Chair moved to the Yahoo Store platform in 2001 with a professionally designed store and an increasing number of products. We redesigned our site in 2009, adding features like Product Reviews, Order Status, and more. We always welcome your comments on how we can improve. Please send us your comments on what you think!

In September 2008, we moved into our newly constructed 7000 square foot warehouse, pictured below. We now have plenty of warehouse space to stock more products, and better serve our customers. This is also where we process and ship your order. We are excited to be growing, yet still keep our small family business service and atmosphere.

The Entrepreneur: Dan Grace, 35, and Jeff Polke, 34, friends and co-founders of GCI Outdoor Inc. in Cromwell, Connecticut

The Product: The Everywhere Chair, developed in 1996, is an outdoor chair with an adjustable back and seat, so the chair can be used on sloping surfaces. The line comprises nine products sold to more than 800 stores-including Eastern Mountain Sports, L.L. Bean and REI-at retail prices between $24 and $60.

Startup: $10,000 was used to apply for a patent and make prototypes. The company also applied for a $25,000 line of credit, which was used to buy office equipment and fund initial production.

Sales: $2 million in 2003, with sales of $2.6 million to $3 million expected for 2004

The Challenge: How to know if you should proceed with a product when you’re not sure if the market is big enough to support it. .

When Dan Grace, an avid golfer and engineer, came up with The Everywhere Chair, he wasn’t sure if he’d have enough customers to build a profitable business. He had designed the adjustable chair to work on sloped surfaces, such as those around putting greens, but golfers proved too small of a market niche. Before long, Grace and business partner Jeff Polke targeted the outdoors market instead. Here’s how they found the right target market and built a multimillion-dollar business around a product that at first seemed to lack broad appeal.

Steps to Success:

1. Don’t quit your day job right away. Grace got his idea for The Everywhere Chair while attending a golf tournament. Around the putting greens, the ground was sloped so people could see better. But traditional lawn chairs don’t work on steep slopes, so spectators went without. The light bulb went on-and Grace decided to develop a new kind of chair and apply for a patent. But he didn’t quit his job as an engineer right away. Instead, he spent more than a year testing the product, making prototypes to show to potential consumers, and doing all the grunt work to be sure the business was ready to sell products.

“The decision to quit my job was based on support [from family and friends], and consumer feedback on my prototypes,” Grace says. “After the patent, preproduction and business investments were made, there was no turning back. After receiving the first 1,500 units, I quit my job, and we hit the streets to sell the product.” Polke, too, waited until the end of the initial startup phase to quit his retail management job.

2. Listen to your customers. Grace and Polke started slowly, selling the product themselves at local trade shows. We started out first at home shows,” Grace says. “Many of the people who came up to us thought The Everywhere Chair would be perfect for camping.” So they switched over to shows for sportsmen and saw more sales success.

In fact, one of their breakthrough products came from listening to a customer. “At one show, a prospect [told] Dan we should make a canoe chair,” says Polke. “Neither Dan nor I had ever paddled a canoe, but Dan created the Sit Backer canoe chair in 1999. That product [pushed] sales to another level.”

3. Generate quick sales. Before Grace quit his job, he attended the Harrisburg Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show in 1997, where he sold 800 chairs to consumers, met potential retail customers and lined up local sales. Using leads from the show and from their own research, Grace and Polke sold the chairs to about 20 retailers, mostly in the Hartford, Connecticut, area. “That local support was huge,” says Grace. Soon, a top sales rep in the industry took on their line. After that, says Grace, “The business took off in New England. He was able to get over 50 new stores to carry the product in just a few months.”
4. Look for help when you’re ready to boost sales. Inventors can bring sales up to $400,000 or $500,000 on their own. But some inventors need help to bring sales past the million-dollar mark. In 2001, Grace and Polke decided to hire a consultant. “Now we view the consultant as a partner in the business,” says Grace. “He helped us analyze where we were making money, he helped us staff efficiently, and he helped our business change from one that was barely making ends meet to one that makes 18 to 22 percent profit annually.”
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