Behind the Many Faces of Innovation, 2010

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in New York Times, December 25, 2010

LAST week was Doyle Doss’s busiest of the year. An advocacy group for the homeless had called from St. Louis to buy 12 of his Kandle Heeter Candle Holders, which promise “dry, radiant space heat from a candle” for just $29.95 each. He also had a bunch of laminated wildlife portraits — priced at $14.95 and sized to “make your refrigerator happy” — to put in the mail, and so many wearable hummingbird feeders on order that he had to hire part-time help to build them all.

Yes, you read that last one right: Mr. Doss, whose tiny creative enterprise, Doss Products, is based in a chilly cow barn just south of Eureka, Calif., is the proud inventor of a hummingbird feeder that he calls the :–2<: (pronounced “eye 2 eye”). Priced at $79.95, it is a red, helmetlike contraption that dispenses sugar water from a tube positioned between two eyeholes. You wear it on your face. Click to continue »

WHEN Vanessa Troyer and Chris Farentinos first hit on the idea that would change their lives, they were thinking big — a little too big, actually.

“It was a mail receptacle/guest house,” Mr. Farentinos jokes, describing an oversize, locking mailbox nicknamed the Elephant Trunk.

His wife agrees. “It was big enough to fit a small family,” Ms. Troyer recalls of their contraption, which the couple invented in 1999 to accept delivery of large packages and to keep the parcels safe and dry, no matter how long homeowners were away.

Back then, they were driven by the belief that as Americans ordered more and more merchandise online, particularly bulky computers, the Elephant Trunk would become a must-have item. It might have happened, too, except that while Mr. Farentinos and Ms. Troyer were still tinkering, the flat screen was born. Before the Elephant Trunk could even be tested and brought to market, its main reason for being — microwave-size computer monitors — became obsolete.

You might wonder why Ms. Troyer, 45, and Mr. Farentinos, 43, can giggle about this. Here’s the answer: From the ashes of their failed experiment arose two smaller products — the Oasis and the Oasis Jr. — that have put their company, Architectural Mailboxes, on the map.

Their smallest locking curbside model is available at Costco.com, Target.com, Lowe’s and about half of Home Depot’s 1,900 stores in the United States. To date, the couple estimates that they’ve sold more than 150,000 of their newfangled, secure letter drops, which cost $97 to $258. They expect to sell 50,000 more this year.

This mom-and-pop success story — the owners qualify because they have two daughters — seemed the perfect way for me to kick off this monthly column about summoning creativity to achieve innovation. Click to continue »