The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Wendy Hampton hasn’t quit her day job. Yet.
Her first royalty check hasn’t yet arrived yet, either. It’s for a board game the Lawrenceville inventor created.
A national inventor talent search discovered Hampton and her board game, Befudiom, in 2005. Since then, the public television series “Everyday Edisons” has turned her idea into a commercial product.Now she’s bumping into people at the supermarket who recognize her from the show, or from her picture in Reader’s Digest. And she’s eagerly awaiting the financial reward for a couple of years of work.
“I don’t know if I can put it into words,” she said. “It’s like hitting a jackpot.”
Hampton created the game to stave off the boredom of her daughter, Taylor, she said.
“She just came to me on a Saturday afternoon. We just had so much fun that day that we never stopped,” she said.
Befudiom combines charades, drawing and other games to get players to guess idioms. An idiom such as “a can of worms” — a complicated situation — might be pantomimed or drawn, or perhaps described $25,000 Pyramid-style, de-pending on the roll of a die.
Hampton, a credit-and-collections manager at Hussmann Corp. in Suwanee, first thought she might be able to get the game into the marketplace on her own, she said. The task proved to be a can of worms, indeed. Facing high marketing and development costs — upwards of $50,000 — she left the idea on the shelf for a while.
“Most people think it’s an overnight success story,” Hampton said. “It takes a lot of patience and, initially, a lot of perseverance if you have an idea that you’re passionate about.”
Photo by Befudiom LLC.
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