Inventions `R' Us

Profile of a start-up retail shop's attempt to create a market for overlooked new products.

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With little money, no retail experience, and one store in a mall in Irving, Tex., Zane Causey and Bob Clark are trying everything they can think of to create a market for overlooked new products

It's the inventor's catch-22: you can't get it to market unless it's proven, but you can't prove it until it gets to market. And Zane Causey, a former preacher and frustrated inventor, knew it well.

Two years ago Causey had developed a new product: the Lawn-sak, a disposable bag for lawn mowers. The steam engine it wasn't, but it was a practical product nevertheless. "Nobody would even talk to me," he recalls. He tried distributing the Lawn-sak himself and even ran ads on late-night TV. But Causey found his product, unproven and unpromoted, shut out. Alas, he was not alone. He knew there were thousands like him, lone inventors with one or two products, desperately looking for an entré into the market.

If the sad tales of fellow inventors weren't proof enough, Causey had only to read the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reports to know he had a market. More than 200,000 patents had been awarded to independent inventors in this country since 1975. Surely, there were 10,000 to 20,000 products among all those patents. Even if only 10% were marketable, that left at least a thousand products. And those were just the patented ones; there was no telling how many others he might find.

Like any good inventor, Causey began tinkering. First, he started a marketing firm, Ideas Plus, to promote inventors' products. "But we were turning down eight new products a month because we didn't have a way to move them," he says. That's when Causey, a barrel-chested man with thick black hair, got an even better idea: what if someone started a chain of stores to showcase inventors' handiwork, thus opening channels for the flood of new products currently closed out of the marketplace? It would be an incubator for never-before-seen inventions, a launching pad for promising products. With the right location and an ever-changing line of practical, low-priced items, Causey's shop was bound to attract buyers, both retail and wholesale, he thought. All he needed was the money to start it.

Causey had no real capital of his own, but Robert Clark did. The two had met through the church to which Clark belonged. Clark, a lean, bespectacled man, had made his money in insurance as a "storm trooper," or independent claims agent, chasing disasters around the country. After three decades of fires, hurricanes, and earthquakes, he wanted less calamity and more equity in his work.

He joined forces with Causey, and they began shopping for a location -- preferably a mall site for the traffic and visibility it offered. "We wanted to give inventors a broad range of customers," Causey explains. They soon found a vacancy in the north corner of a half-mile-long mall in Irving, Tex. There, a clothing store next door to Everything's a Dollar and across from Frederick's of Hollywood had gone belly-up. With a recession stalking, Causey and Clark had a crack at a temporary lease for a rock-bottom rent. Midway between Dallas and Fort Worth, and minutes from the airport, the Irving Mall -- even the slow end of it -- would draw the right mix of shoppers, they hoped. They sealed their partnership with an Orange Julius.

On a Saturday afternoon last September, Causey and Clark threw open the doors to the New Product Showcase (NPS), "a world of new ideas" right there in the Irving Mall. This, their flagship store, looked every bit the inventor's experiment, with its mix-and-match fixtures, homemade displays, and worn carpet. Just 20 products, spread thin, graced the shelves. And announcing the grand opening was a plain brown sign with a typo. "A deal," Clark explains.

Six months later, one wet morning in March, the back room at the New Product Showcase is strewed with new ideas and old buckets. The roof is leaking again. A chain-smoking Clark is packing up a water-balloon catapult for shipment to a lawyer in Los Angeles. Everyone else is too busy working the phones to notice as another piece of the ceiling falls. Meanwhile, Causey has an eager inventor on the line.

"Here's the hook," he tells him. "You pay us $350, bring in your product, and in 15 minutes it's in the accounting system and on the shelves for 90 days."

To bootstrapping inventors, it sounds like the answer to a prayer. They could forget the empty promises of fly-by-night inventor outfits and crooked patent lawyers, as well as the thousands of dollars in up-front fees those agents often demand. Causey and Clark would give inventors what they really wanted: a shelf to call their own for 90 days.

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