A $100,000 Education for Newbie Inventors

Property developers-turned-inventors Marianne and Rick Kay learned the hard way about turning their nifty prototype into a viable business

Entrepreneurs: Marianne Kay, 51, and Rick Kay, 44

Background: Sports enthusiasts and parents of three athletic kids, Kay and Rick worked together in real estate development for 16 years before launching Cleatskins.

The Company: Kay and her husband, Rick, launched Cleatskins in 2005, using their real estate ventures to fund the startup. In 2008, the business released its first product, Cleatskins Sole, a rubber outsole designed to cover cleats, allowing athletes to wear them off the field without damaging the cleats themselves or the surface beneath them. The company has since expanded its line to five different athletic shoe "skins."

Sales: Estimated $1.5 million in 2009

Her Story: One day in late 2004 I banished Rick to the front porch to change out the cleats on our eldest son's dirty baseball shoes. Even though he'd done this countless times before, a light bulb went on. Wouldn't it be great, Rick thought, if athletes had something that slipped easily over cleats to protect their footwear and give them traction while moving to and from games? It could save time, money, messes, and horrible cleats-on-concrete spills.

The easy part was coming up with a great idea. The hard part was turning it into a real business. First, we looked to see if we could find anything similar on the market. Having found nothing, we amassed a small library of "how-to" books covering inventions and patents. We commandeered the kitchen table for several months. For our homemade designs, we used swim caps, glue, lycra, pieces of sandals—anything we could find. Next came sketches and a list of requirements, such as an impermeable layer. We found a patent attorney through recommendations and a product designer/developer through the Internet. We agreed to the designer/developer's fee of $4,000 for 40 hours of work. We thought that would buy us the entire project. We quickly learned it bought us just a fraction of what we needed.

After four months of drawings, our designer/developer returned from overseas, carrying our prototype in a shoebox. Excited, we discussed factory minimums, commissions, and delivery charges. Just before opening the box, he mentioned that the factory had taken the liberty of making a few minor changes. He showed us a pair of very cheap, poorly made sandals that looked nothing like our sketches and suspiciously like sandals that factory might have already been producing for next to nothing. Our homemade swim-cap/sandal-sole/lycra things from our kitchen table looked better. That was lesson No. 1: Your vision can only be upheld if it is made clear to everyone. We should have had sign-offs every step of the way, to avoid surprises.

Designer After Designer

We hired a new designer/developer with impressive scientific knowledge. He was highly precise and methodical, and we thought we had our man. Unfortunately, after three months, we couldn't seem to move beyond the science behind the material into the actual design of a product. Next, we worked with a husband-wife team that was eager, earnest, and talented. Their drawings were beautiful, with sketches we wanted to frame. The prototypes, however, turned out to be crude and ill-fitting, not to mention quite costly. For instance, one of the factories they wanted to use charged $16,000 per mold—later we realized we could get more accurate molds for $3,000. It wasn't the couple's fault; it was ours for having hired them—they were not in the athletic footwear business. The factories they used either required us to pay for retooling their equipment to accommodate our needs, or charged what they thought they could. Lesson No. 2: Your team should consist of individuals experienced in precisely what you need them to do.