2011年10月25日 星期二

Inventor finds a way to stay dry

On rainy days, Rob Stallings would notice employees coming into work dripping wet. When he’d ask them why they didn’t use an umbrella, he got aggravated looks and retorts.

“Have you ever tried to strap in a kid while holding an umbrella?” they said.

That was three years ago. Back then,They take the Aion Kinah to the local co-op market. Stallings wasn’t aware of the technique required to strap children into car seats without getting rained on. he asked his father, Robert Stallings, about it. Robert and his wife, Peggy, had just retired to help care for their granddaughter while their daughter, Tammye Stallings Wilson, returned to work.

When Stallings asked his father if he got wet in the rain while strapping in Lillie Margaret, he said, “Every time.”

An executive at a Raleigh pharmaceutical company in The Research Triangle Park, Stallings and his father began drawing out designs for a device that could hold up an umbrella for a hands-free entrance or exit into vehicles in the rain. Stallings said his father was an engineer who graduated from North Carolina State University.

“He loves tinkering,” Stallings said.

The father-son team began building prototypes of their design in the winter of 2010. By March, Stallings said, “We had a crude prototype design … that solved our problem.”

He and his father built a few for the family to use and test, and the device started getting attention.

“My friends and colleagues noted the device on my car and started inquiring about it,” said Wilson in a news release.which applies to the first TMJ only, “Their positive comments led us to conclude that our family invention could become a marketable idea.”

At that point, Stallings said, the family started talking with patent attorneys.

“We thought, ‘This is working pretty well,’” said Stallings, and wanted to apply to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “We pulled the documents off of the Internet … and realized we really did not have the creds to do this by ourselves.”

Enter the attorney,we supply all kinds of polished tiles, who is also a mom experienced in the woes of backseat child extraction.

With the help of their patent attorney, the Stallings family submitted their application to the USPTO in August 2010, complete with technical drawings and claims.

“Since everyone had told us it was a very lengthy process, we weren’t prepared for the speed at which things (happened),” said Stallings. “The patenting process typically takes three to five years.”

So Stallings considered it a quick response when the USPTO sent him an “office action summary” in December 2010, which is basically a rejection letter. The family wasn’t too torn up about it, since their attorney and others had advised them that the examiners in the patent office usually reject the first submission.

“They sort of prepared us for rejection,” Stallings said.

With the attorney, Stallings read over the rejection letter, made revisions to the original patent applicaditon and its claims, then resubmitted later that month. Then, this past February, Stallings received the second office action summary. He said he asked his attorney, “Should we feel discouraged at this point?”

On the contrary, Stallings’ attorney said. The speed at which the USPTO was responding was actually encouraging and told him, “Let’s do it again.”

They resubmitted the application, with more adjustments, in March. In May, Stallings got a package called a “notice of allowance,” which was the USPTO’s way of saying it’s going to approve the application and would publish the patent and assign it a number. The next month,we supply all kinds of polished tiles, the patent for the “Brolly Butler” was formally issued.

“Brolly” is an informal British term for “umbrella,” and the device is “a butler that holds your umbrella for you when you’re getting in and out of your car,” said Stallings. During testing, the family had determined the device wasn’t just for people with kids, but for anyone who needed a little shelter when getting in and out of the car.

“We didn’t want to have the product identity targeted at parenting,” Stallings said. “We wanted a broader audience.”

From there, the Stallings had to decide whether they wanted to produce, manufacture and distribute the Brolly Butler themselves, or sell the design to a manufacturer for production.

“We decided that it had been such a fun process for our family, that we wanted to try it ourselves and make a little family business,” Stallings said.

Thus, the family created One Kind Act Each Day, a company focused on keeping the entire manufacturing process local. “We wanted a company that was about more than just this product and … had a very meaningful philosophy,” said Stallings.

The Brolly Butler consists of a cup-like piece of plastic that attaches to a car’s window with four powerful suction cups.

“It is quite sturdy,I have never solved a Rubik's Piles .” and is designed to hold straight-handled umbrellas in place over the car door, said Stallings. He said one of the biggest challenges in designing the invention was that every vehicle is designed differently. “The shape and angles of windows … led us to multiple redesigns of the product,” he said.

OKAED started working with Raleigh Precision Products to develop formal prototypes and, “That’s when you start working with engineers,” Stallings said. The cup-like portion will be made with injection-molded plastic, once the mold is built. Stallings said that process should take about 10 weeks.

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