Getting Ideas To Market
One evening in early 2002, Chilton neighbors Jim Koller, who pours concrete, and Lee Roehrig, who drives a semi, were contemplating Koller’s new lawn over a couple of cocktails.
Koller mentioned a contraption he had assembled to elevate the downspouts so they wouldn’t lay on his tender young grass. Roehrig, as it happened, was thinking about patenting his own idea for a device to keep downspouts out of his mower’s way.
In the case of The Lawn Saver, Old Fashioned was the mother of invention. After five years of partnering, patenting, prototyping, manufacturing and marketing, Koller, 43, and Roehrig, 61, have managed to put their invention on the shelves at local True Value Hardware and Mills Fleet Farm stores. They call their company “I (as in inventors) Minds LLC.”
The Lawn Saver is essentially a plastic V on which the downspout rests. Another piece of plastic attached to the front deflects water to the downspout’s sides, diffusing the pressure. The invention is the easy part of inventing, Koller and Roehrig were to realize.
“We were both very, very green,” Roehrig said. “We had to learn everything as we went along, but we were very fortunate in that we ran across a lot of knowledgeable people as we went along.”
The Wisconsin Innovation Service Center at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater helped Koller and Roehrig with a new product assessment, including a preliminary patent search. A patent protects an inventor’s right to keep someone else from making or selling an invention in the U.S. or importing it.
The next step was hiring an attorney to handle the actual patenting. They found a retired lawyer who was willing to help them for a fraction of the typical fee. TD Services Inc., Chilton — a company Koller’s wife’s relatives own — took care of the required drawings and made a prototype.
“The patent search took quite a while, about three months,” Koller remembers, but the news was good. “They said there was no patent on a product that was anything like this.”
The Lawn Saver made its debut on Fleet Farm’s shelves last fall. It has sold about 5,000 units. A catalogue called Picket Fence will start carrying The Lawn Saver later this summer. And Koller and Roehrig are pitching their invention to Menards in mid-June.
“Fleet Farm was really the kicker,” Koller said. “They’re the ones who are going to get us into the larger accounts.”
Now, they only have to sell about half a million units to break even.
Photo by Patrick Ferron.
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