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.

“Innovation and invention in America are not dead,” wrote Mr. Doss, 62, in an e-mail that included links to YouTube videos that he said proved his point. In them, hummingbirds hovered two inches above people’s nostrils, sticking their beaks into the red, vaguely frightening masks.

Watching them, you couldn’t help but think: If that isn’t American ingenuity at its wacky finest, what is?

Prototype heard from hundreds of inventors in 2010, and most told of a problem they had encountered that they just had to solve. Among the things that stoked their creativity were cleavage, a skiing accident, a tattered pair of blue jeans, the complications of shaving, and the desire to not spill a cup of coffee while boarding an airplane. The solutions included a variety of products and services: a snap-to-bra camisole-like device (cleava.com), arch supports (lovemystrutz.com), a repair service for beloved jeans (denimtherapy.com), a razor whose handle dispenses shaving cream (ShaveMate.com) and a portable cup holder (cup-pilot.com).

More was motivating many of these folks than mere necessity or the hopes of striking it rich. In many of the e-mails, there was an undercurrent of something more fundamental: the inventors’ need to express themselves, to leave their mark and to communicate and connect with others not by talking or writing, but by building stuff.

“It’s an ego thing,” says Pam Starobin, another inventor who got in touch.

Ms. Starobin, 55, is a librarian who lives in Yonkers. She’s something of a renaissance woman, with a nearly completed master’s degree in art history and a previous career writing computer software; she invented CostGuard, a program for restaurant and food service management. But her proudest achievement, professionally speaking, is her invention of an adult booster seat.

Ms. Starobin, you see, stands just 4 feet 11. And when she sits, well, she’s even shorter. For years, a trip to the theater made her teeth grind together as she stared at the backs of people’s heads. At some low-slung restaurants, it was as if her chin barely reached the tabletop. “I’d seethe, instead of enjoying what I’m doing,” she says. “I thought: I can resolve this.”

The Sitting Taller Handbag (sittingtaller.com) is the result. Made of furniture-grade foam hidden inside a leather shoulder bag, it comes in black, red or green and sells for $129 for a 2 ½-inch lift ($139 for 3 ½ inches). Ms. Starobin has its leatherwork sewn for her, but she makes all the pillows herself. Since starting in March 2008, she says, she’s sold several hundred.

Does she make any money? “A very little bit,” she says. “I’m not leaving my job — let me put it that way.” But what she lacks in remuneration she makes up for in satisfaction. She gets letters that say things like: “Just so you know, this present was the biggest hit at Hanukkah. You made a 96-year-old lady who still loves the philharmonic and theater very, very happy!”

“It’s like, I’ve helped someone,” Ms. Starobin says. “It’s pretty cool.”

MR. DOSS, too, is motivated by utility. “How do I help people stay warmer in winter?” was the question that kick-started his inventing career, he says. The son of an Arkansas farmer who taught him “If it broke, you fixed it; if it broke twice, you figured out how to make it better,” Mr. Doss has been building things since he got his first Erector Set in childhood. He’s proud that his candle heaters and another heating device — the BluBox Thermal fan, which pumps the warm air that has risen to the ceiling back down to the floor — are designed to save users money.

Originally appeared in the New York Times, August 8, 2010

ONE Sunday a month, this column seeks out creative thinkers and tells their stories. You might think that finding these folks would be easy, and we acknowledge that the Prototype in-box is often flooded by readers’ suggestions. But finding entrepreneurs whose sagas say something insightful about business culture — other than just “Buy my product!” — isn’t always a cinch.

That’s why Jules Pieri and Joanne Domeniconi inspire awe. What Prototype does 12 times a year, these women do five times a week at their e-commerce start-up, Daily Grommet. Their goal is to promote innovation by endorsing what they call “nice companies,” ones with well-made products and impeccable service. If those products preserve a craft or protect the environment, they say, all the better.

Here’s what distinguishes Daily Grommet from other Web marketplaces like eBay or Etsy: To be featured on Daily Grommet, you have to be chosen. In the tradition of the seal-of-approval judges at Good Housekeeping, the 15-person Daily Grommet team does its own research and features only products and companies it has battle-tested.

The women behind Daily Grommet say their goal is to enable consumers to find products that support their values. That doesn’t mean every item on the site claims to do good; there’s plenty of whimsy for sale. But by offering a curated list, the site seeks to help people patronize innovative companies that its team believes will treat customers well. Ms. Pieri calls this link between buyers and inventors “citizen commerce.”

Amid recent blunders and betrayals in corporate America, consumers have “a burning hunger for real leadership and access to authentic experiences and trustworthy people,” Ms. Pieri says. Daily Grommet’s solution is to highlight inventive products that often don’t have the marketing muscle to promote themselves.

What, you must be wondering, is meant by the use of the word “grommet”? The site, whose logo is a drawing of the real thing (a metal ring used to reinforce an eyelet), explains: “It’s a wonderful product still waiting in the wings, just ripe for discovery. It comes from a designer, or inventor, or artist or manufacturer who is clearly passionate about what they create.”

Every weekday at noon Eastern time, the site, based in an 1880s Victorian house in Lexington, Mass., posts “Today’s Grommet,” products like a hands-free flashlight, a newfangled pogo stick and an embroidered Peruvian belt. There are pictures and prices, as well as a video made by the site that shows how to use the product and often introduces its creators.

“We are seeing an unprecedented democratization of innovation, but existing retail and distribution systems don’t give everyday people access to the fruits of that trend,” Ms. Pieri says, noting that new, cheaper prototyping tools have made it easier to become an inventor. Of Daily Grommet’s chosen partners, she says, “We raise their game.”

Then the site makes that game — or salad bowl, or bracelet adorned with a USB drive — easy to buy. Ordering is simple, and Daily Grommet promises buyer satisfaction and a money-back guarantee. “We’re responsible for the customer’s experience,” Ms. Pieri says. In return, the site gets a cut of the revenue; she won’t say how much, though it’s enough to enable the site not to carry advertising.

The lack of ads is important because the Daily Grommet team seeks to be more than a buying platform. It wants its endorsement to stand for quality, which won’t happen if customers perceive that praise is for sale.

Not long ago, Ms. Domeniconi, whose title is chief discovery officer, drove three hours north to visit Custom Cordage, a company in Waldoboro, Me., that weaves doormats out of recycled fishing line, or “float rope.”

In the resulting video about “the most beautiful doormats you’ve ever seen,” she explains that the colorful rope has been banned because it harms marine life. She lauded Custom Cordage for helping the lobster industry and for keeping people employed year-round.

Daily Grommet started in October 2008, in a week when the financial markets plunged. The site, whose investors include Geraldine Laybourne, founder of Oxygen Media, was the brainchild of Ms. Pieri, an industrial designer with a Harvard M.B.A. who’s worked at companies like Stride Rite and Keds. She grew up in Detroit, the daughter of an autoworker. From childhood she was interested in how products were designed, engineered and made.

April 18, 2010
By AMY WALLACE

IN 2006, Frank Nuovo was 45 — “boom!” he says, “five more years to 50!” — and at the top of his game. Except for one thing: “I’d kind of lost my soul.”

As chief of design at Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone supplier, Mr. Nuovo presided over a huge team that brought 250 products and accessories to market each year. Among many other things, he was credited with inventing removable face plates, those colorful accessories that turn a phone into a personal fashion statement.

A sought-after public speaker, Mr. Nuovo logged about 200,000 miles a year on planes and was often inter viewed by journalists, one of whom, in a profile in The New Yorker, called him “the Henry Ford — or at least the Calvin Klein — of cellular communication.”

But something wasn’t right. Everybody’s heard of the Peter Principle, the idea that organizations tend to promote people to one level beyond their competency. But what do you call an almost-opposite phenomenon, when a person is promoted to the highest heights and excels at that altitude, but is left feeling empty? Whatever you call it, that’s what Mr. Nuovo was experiencing.

“It was painful. Being chief of design at Nokia was a dream job, and I had so much invested,” he says, describing the creative crossroads at which he found himself. But when it came to hands-on design, he recalls, “I was talking about it rather than doing it. And I needed to go back to doing it before I talked about it anymore.”

So, four years ago, a few days after his 45th birthday, Mr. Nuovo stepped down — or up, depending on your point of view. Immediately, he set about re-educating himself, mastering new design tools, like Rhinoceros for modeling and Photoshop, that had become essential in the years he’d been busy with administration and corporate strategy. With Nokia’s blessing, he also became a full-time champion of Vertu, a subsidiary he had set in motion in 1998 and had been nurturing ever since.

Mr. Nuovo says Vertu, a maker of cellphones so high-end that he calls them “communication devices,” made him whole again.

Some may mock the idea that Mr. Nuovo relocated his soul by devoting himself to creating status symbols for the world’s richest people. Vertu phones, after all, are made of gold, platinum, titanium and stainless steel. Some are wrapped in hand-tooled leather and ostrich skin or set with pavé diamonds. Depending on their bling factor, most Vertu phones retail from $5,000 to $25,000. (Special editions start at $80,000; one sculpted gold-and-sapphire phone sold for more than $325,000.)

To ponder Vertu’s ruby bearings and laser-cut ceramic keys is to imagine Thorstein Veblen, the Norwegian-American sociologist and economist, thrashing about in his grave. In his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” he coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how people, rich or poor, acquire cool stuff to impress and to establish a pecking order. To this guy, even silver flatware seemed like wretched excess. Veblen would surely have seen Vertu as too-too.

One tech blog could have been channeling Veblen when it declared: “Overkill, thy name is Vertu.” But Mr. Nuovo, an amiable Californian who lives in Bel Air and tends to wear black blazers over black T-shirts, rejects that critique. Beautiful objects are desirable, he says. And as objects go, the cellphone is increasingly more ubiquitous than those old lions of luxury, fancy pens and wristwatches.

Vertu won’t release sales figures, but Mr. Nuovo says the company — which has more than 80 boutiques in cities like Tokyo, Dubai, Milan, Las Vegas and London and is opening one on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in May — is plenty profitable, even in these tight times.

“The watch is disappearing. And everybody in the world is walking around with these,” he says on a recent afternoon, spreading an assortment of cellphones — all of them Nokias or Vertus of his own making — on a table at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he was once a student.

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.

It is often said that there are no new ideas, but Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos turned that cliché inside out. By correctly anticipating how the high-tech future would change the way we shop, they updated one of the most low-tech items around: the repository of snail mail, the trusty mailbox. Along the way, they responded to a growing concern — identity theft — that established mailbox suppliers had failed to address.

“Identity theft was at the top of consumers’ minds. And the mailbox industry was dominated by some large players that just didn’t have an answer for it,” says Rhys Jones, the Home Depot executive who first stocked the Oasis line in 2005 because it met “a need we needed met.”

What was so special about an Oasis? Well, for one thing, thieves couldn’t get their hands past its patented Hopper door — a hinged opening that functions much like those on the Postal Service’s big blue mailboxes. Also, it wasn’t ugly.

“Typically, some of the best innovations come from the small guys,” says Mr. Jones. “They’re more willing to take a risk and they see things that others don’t.” The Oasis was “safe and secure, aesthetically pleasing, do-it-yourself friendly and a great price for the value.”

Oh, and it had something else: a pitchwoman who was unwilling to hear the word no. “Vanessa,” Mr. Jones notes, “is very passionate about her product.”

Ms. Troyer, who handles marketing for the company, first buttonholed Mr. Jones at a trade show. She’d been trying to get into Home Depot for months when he walked by her booth.

“I saw the orange lanyard all the Home Depot people wore, and ran up to him,” she recalls. (This is a signature move for her: she introduced herself to her husband of 20 years in much the same way).

Mr. Jones recalls that when Home Depot first agreed to test the Oasis Jr. in 50 stores, Ms. Troyer helped pick the locations — she had kept her own records of where the product had sold best. “She knew what consumers wanted,” he says, “and where.”

Consider, too, the way she typed the name of Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon.com, into Google and clicked through 58 pages until she found his phone number. She called and, saying that she wanted to send Mr. Bezos a birthday card, also got his address.