Lisa Shaefer awoke one morning to find a laundry basket, tools and other flotsam strewn across her front lawn in San Antonio, Texas. "Hey," she remembers saying to herself. "Those are mine!"
Someone had robbed the shed in her backyard. Magnifying the sense of violation were muddy footprints that stopped at her bedroom's glass door. From that harrowing experience, the light bulb of invention clicked on - literally. Shaefer, 57, has developed the Lite Owl, a low-watt outdoor LED night-light that switches on at dusk and turns off at dawn.
"I was too cheap to use my porch light," the former dental hygienist says. "But I wondered if anyone would have had the nerve (to rob my shed) if I had lighting out there."
She used indoor night-lights on her porch for a bit. But they carry warnings about fire hazards. "I was in a brand new house," she says. "I didn't want to burn it down."
Quick research led her to conclude there was a market for low-watt porch night-lights. National building codes require standard electrical sockets at front entry ways. So she believed she had a market.
She also found validation in positive feedback from the likes of Harvey Reese, author "How to License Your Million Dollar Idea."
He evaluated the Lite Owl and, according to Shaefer, said, "I believe the Lite Owl is logical, novel and useful, and could therefore find a broad audience." But along her journey to product development, she confesses to making a variety of wrong turns. "Everything you could do wrong," she says, "I did." Her initial patent attorney let the patent lapse during the application phase - not once, but three times. He failed to respond to the U.S. Patent and Trademark's requests for more information. "Everyone says don't interfere with the USPTO," she says. "I finally called the USPTO and they said, 'Lady, that's in default.'
"The attorney apologized and said it would never happen again," she adds. "I didn't think he'd let (the patent application) slip again. He did." Then she made the mistake of doing business with a prototype firm that, well, went out of business. The company produced a working indoor prototype for her, but it was a hack job.
"They screwed up during the making of it," she says, "and cut-and-pasted a fix." The company produced drawings of her outdoor night-light, but failed to deliver a physical specimen before going belly-up.
Having procured working prototypes of her outdoor night-light with another company, she later responded to a national contest in 2005 that requested inventors send in their prototypes. She submitted two. The group lost both of them. Fortunately, she says, the group paid her $5,000 to redo her models. Some of her problems were her own doing.
Lite Owl was a semifinalist in Procter & Gamble's 2003 hunt for the next hot consumer product contest. (The United Inventors Association and Inventors Digest under previous ownership also were sponsors.)
She says judges would have given it higher marks had they been able to see her invention. Shaefer says she submitted photos in "enormous" file sizes. Judges couldn't see the entire product - just portions of it on the screen.
"One judge called and said 'I didn't vote for you because I didn't understand it,' " she says. "He would have voted for it had he been able to see the product. It was like looking at the magnified version of something without the context."
While Inventors Digest was exchanging emails and phone calls in preparation for this article, Shaefer wrote with good news.
Working with patent agency Invention Home (See TalkBack, Page 42), she landed a licensing deal with Globe Electric Co. out of Montreal, Canada. The company previously expressed interest in her product after seeing it on display at the National Hardware Show in Las Vegas.
The happy ending comes next year, when the product is scheduled to hit store shelves.
