Mom Inventor To Compete On “Homemade Millionaire”

You could say that Marcy McKenna was born into a home filled with inventors reports The Orange County Register. As a child, her home was filled with ideas. Over breakfast they would bounce ideas off each other, even joking with her mom that they must be “cereal inventors.”

We call ourselves cereal inventors because we go over our inventions over our bowls of cereal,” McKenna says, laughing, as she describes the conversations she and her mother Carolyn Skenderian had.

But over the years, none of McKenna’s creations ever went anywhere beyond the binder where she kept the sketches and plans and patent searches, until one day in the summer of 2009, while poking around Google Patents, she spotted an ad for a new TV series that stopped her cold.

“One link led to another and Kelly (Ripa)’s face came up, and the ad said, ‘We’re looking for female inventors,” McKenna says. “It was a couple of hours before the whole (casting) process closed, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve missed the opportunity of my lifetime.”

Still, she had to try, and luck was with her: more than a year after that night at her computer, McKenna will appear in the premiere of “Homemade Millionaire” on TLC at 10 p.m. Friday, competing to win a contract for Home Shopping Network to sell one of her inventions.

McKenna calls her creation the Styling Station Hair Care Center, a product born out the frustration she and her mother felt every time they looked at the tangled mess of cords and hair-care appliances that cluttered their bathrooms.

“I thought they’ll probably just be a dream for me, but maybe someday I’ll pass them along to my children and they’ll make them and make money from them,” she says.

And then the TLC show came along, and suddenly she had her best shot yet. McKenna can’t say whether she or one of the other two women on the show won on Friday’s episode, but regardless of how she fared, the experience has moved her longtime dreams closer to reality.

“It changed everything for me,” she says. “It inspired me in ways that this process only could. I’m waking up at 4:30 a.m. in the morning so I can work on my company and my inventions before I have to get breakfast for my kids. And I really like that they’re seeing me follow my dream — that’s such an important thing for kids.”

Photo from Simply Solved Innovations

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