Goggleflauge™
If you've ever played paintball, you know that camouflage is a key to victory. When you're in the woods, crouched among the brush, executing the tactics your team depends on for victory, the last thing you want is your goggle lenses gleaming in the sun. You may as well stand up and wave your hands.
As the sport evolved, the camouflage became very sophisticated. While the weekend warriors wore sweats with white socks peeking out, every inch of our bodies were covered in the traditional camo colors we all know. I even wore a camo head cover.
Everything blended, except the eyes.
Common sense and international paintball regulations require eye protection or goggles for all players, for obvious reason. A paintball tagging you on exposed skin is sure to raise a welt. You certainly need to cover the eyes. But goggles are dead giveaways. They are the only part of a player's body that do not blend, and are often a key reason I saw an opponent a moment before he saw me. I was taken out my own share of times by my goggles betraying me.
This was a problem I could solve. The research aspect was complete. I knew every single goggle manufacturer out there, including the ones that didn't make goggles for the sport. We'd researched everything without really trying, simply in an effort to gain an advantage.
I knew that I didn't want to compete against the goggle manufacturers. Their goggles were sophisticated and expensive, and simply lacked a needed component. The right solution would be complementary, not competitive.
I researched production methods, and ultimately went with a simple, inexpensive solution. While the design could have been injection or blow-molded, we settled on good old fashion stamping, with a total setup cost of $500.
To be even more efficient, we found a way to use the scrap from the product. Goggleflauge is cut on a 12-inch square of foam material, and rather than push the dye all the way to the edge, I moved it in about a half-inch from the outside edges. This meant that during manufacturing, all of the foam was already attached except for a few pieces. As the machine opened and closed there wouldn't be a lot of parts for the machine operator to clean up before the next closure on the press. This meant he could work faster, keeping labor costs as low as possible. We later boxed this fringed scrap and gave it away to stores to use as decoration.
Because Goggleflauge™ fits over the goggle, we always had a large piece of scrap left over from where the lens of the goggle is. Scrap adds up pretty quickly when you're doing thousands of these things. Manufacturers hate disposal costs. It's a direct drain on the bottom line. So we cut two slots on the sides of the scrap, and used the eye foam to create two pieces of ear camouflage. I hadn't thought of ear camo at the time, it simply solved an economic problem, added a product benefit and increased the perceived value because it came "free" with every Goggleflauge.
Once the product started selling, I filed a utility patent on the product (US Patent #5652963). By this time in my career, I knew I had one year to file after I went public. So, once it proved itself in the market, I spent the extra bucks to get the protection a patent offers.