ARTICLES WRITTEN ABOUT Tarlow Design LLC’S KEN TARLOW

CALIFORNIA'S KEN TARLOW… A CHAMPION IN THE WORLD OF NEW PRODUCTS

By Rick Sine, Pacific Sun June 13, 1995.

Hang out with Ken Tarlow of Corte Madera, the “Inventor Mentor,” long enough, and the physical world can seem oddly transfigured. Those tiny obstacles you take for granted bloom out, like looking through a microscope at your benign rash and gasping in horror at the massive red eruptions blighting your skin.

Take the collective grief caused every day by ice-cube trays. Short of those ice makers in expensive refrigerators, which are constantly breaking down anyway, no one has figured out how to make a dispenser that can reliably release a single ice cube at a time without causing all the other cubes to fall out. The problem can be solved with those stiff plastic trays, but only by careful water filling and a long fingernail – and only for some cubes, while others remain unreachable.

The other day, after returning from a talk with Ken Tarlow, I found myself in the office kitchen, tipping over the ice-cube tray, my hand splayed over it to catch what I could. When too many cubes dropped out, I had to bend over to pick up a couple of slippery cubes, and then, for possibly the first time in my life, it came to me: there must be a better way—no doubt I am not the first to think this. There is probably an entire chilly division of Rubbermaid devoted to Ice-Cube Dispenser Improvement, complete with dozens of cryo-specialists donning white spacesuits in a warehouse-sized test freezer.

But most people pay little attention to what author Nicholson Baker Calls “the often undocumented daily texture of our lives. “Instead, most folks just figure these little frustrations are a part of life. They take it on the chin. Ken Tarlow doesn’t think this is a good idea. As a “product developer, “Tarlow’s job is to help people solve these everyday problems. You come to him with an idea for a product, and he helps patent it, design and build it, and sell it to a manufacturer in a “one-stop-shop” approach. He’s developed over a hundred products, several of which you’ve probably used, which have netted an amazing $400 million in retail sales. By his own estimate, he’s made at least a dozen millionaires.

Tarlow’s design experience has ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, from being the right-hand tinkerer for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to making cheap trinkets for the infamously cheesy Ronco mail-order company. These days, his goal is humbler and more inspiring; as an inventor, he speaks for the common man.

Once upon a time, the world was enchanted by stories of solitary eccentrics like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, inventors who spawned empires from their work desks. Now, we think of most “inventors” as engineering geeks in huge, windowless corporate laboratories whose inventions are instantly absorbed into the corporate maw. By contrast, most of Tarlow’s clients wouldn’t even call themselves inventors. They’re just people who have had an idea milling around for a while. “I have spent the last twenty years helping people to convert their dreams into action," Tarlow wrote in an essay. The truth seems a little more prosaic if more interesting. As co-inventor of the Hair Vac, the Zip Sip, and the smokeless Ashtray, among hundreds of other contraptions, Ken Tarlow deals in what one might call the Post-It Miracle-the late capitalist magic trick though, which is a silly little idea, if built cheaply, distributed widely and marketed well, can bloom into a vast fortune. LET'S TAKE ANOTHER ONE of these little hassles of life: slipping a pillow into a pillowcase. You might think Harold Moen of Larkspur was the first one to stick the end of a pillow under his chin, clamp his chin down toward his neck to suspend the pillow, fluff the pillowcase underneath the pillow, carefully maneuver the pillow between the edges of the pillowcase (without being able to see the case), jerk the pillow down into the case, and then think: There must be another way.

But no. People have had such thoughts for over a hundred years, as evidenced by the first patent that Ken Tarlow dug up for his client. The Pillow-Holder, designed by Charles N. Leonard of Indianapolis in 1887, was a three-sided wooden frame designed to hold the pillow as the slip was pulled over it. The device never caught on, perhaps because it required the user to sew two loops to the corners of his pillows.

In 1929, Mary Morgan and Charles Hammer of Lima, Ohio, gave it another try with their “device for inserting pillows in slips,” which required tow frames and could only fit a certain size pillow. Soon after, another invention was patented involving a permanent clip on the end of the pillow, which would engage a support board.

Harold Moen, however, had some new designs in mind. He constructed an aluminum device shaped like a diving rod about ten years ago. The rod had clips on each end to secure the pillow. But this appeared to be too expensive to make. More recently, he realized that two lengths of light, inexpensive PVC pipe could be pinched around either side of the pillow, compressing the pillow for easy slippage. Moen presented a prototype to Tarlow, who refined the mechanism by which the two pieces of pipe could be quickly released out of the pillowcase once it had been slipped over the pillow. (The quick-released involves a cable, two springs, and a retaining ball.) With the Pillow Ease (patent pending), you’ll never have to put a pillow on your chin again. Instead, one end of the device is equipped with a rigid rubber strip that can be placed against your stomach as you slip the pinched pillow into the case. “You can buy all the parts at a hardware store for eighty-seven cents,” Moen, 82, says excitedly. “It’ll sell for about fifteen bucks,” Moen says he’s test-marketed the Pillow Ease with the local Marriott hotel maids, who told him they liked it. If he makes a profit, Moen, who is comfortably retired, plans to give the proceeds to charity.

THE NEXT STEP, selling the Pillow Ease idea to a manufacturer who will crank out the product, is the hard part, though it looks like the Pillow Ease will make it over that hurdle also. Tarlow says Pillow Ease is now being seriously considered by a Southern California company that markets the successful “Sheet Suspenders” product.

Tarlow says that one of every four or five inventions he develops is sold to a manufacturer and makes it to market. That may not sound like an excellent record, but Tarlow says many product development books predict a one-hundred-to-one ratio. The product developer also puts his small operation in opposition to big marketing companies that allegedly prey on amateur inventors. Inventors’ groups say these companies don’t try to sell inventions to manufacturers. One such company, American Inventors Corporation in Massachusetts, admits [in a Wall Street Journal article] a success rate of less than 2 percent. Nonetheless, the major firms in the field continue to rake in over $100 million a year.

Tarlow says he only charges enough upfront fees to break even. If he makes any profit, it’s from royalties: 20 percent for constructing the prototype and getting the patent and 20 percent more when he licenses the product. This gives him a stake in the success of the product.

However, Tarlow rejects some product ideas outright because of some “fatal flaw.” When somebody came to him with suggestions that a car’s steering wheel could be converted to an electronic drum set (the inventor wanted to call it “Traffic Jammers”), Tarlow turned it down because it was too dangerous. “We feel we’re doing a great service by telling people not to do something,” he says.

Essential to the inventors’ mindset, Tarlow avers, is the “need to ask the question why” instead of simply adapting to the hardships of our common environment. Sometimes, it takes a new and innocent approach, Tarlow says, pointing out the example of Edwin Land.

Land, founder of Polaroid Corporation, was on vacation in Santa Fe with his wife and three-year-old daughter. After sightseeing, his daughter asked why she couldn’t see the snapshots immediately. Land took her question seriously. Three years later, the Polaroid instant camera was born. ONE DAY in 1972, Ken Tarlow was sitting in a hotel lobby in Majorca, Spain, with over two thousand other people who had gathered at the hotel to learn how to teach Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. During this training session, the Maharishi remarked that ensuring everyone was showing up for the lessons was nearly impossible. The Maharishi wanted a huge board full of lights that a trainee could switch on when he walked into the lobby so the guru could know at a glance who was present and who was playing hooky. “And who can do this?” the Maharishi asked, staring at the room. Tarlow looked at his old childhood friend Howard Beckerman, also a follower of the guru. Howard and Ken gained local notoriety in ninth grade by bringing walking and talking robots to school. The year before, they had set up a two-stage rocket that shot up a half mile, then crashed on a neighbor’s lawn.

Tarlow and Beckerman raised their hands, starting a four-year journey as the Maharishi’s top hardware men. The light board proved impossible – it demanded too much electricity – but soon, the Maharishi lit upon another idea. He wanted an inexpensive VCR and television set to allow him to spread his teachings. After years of effort, “vedavision” never got off the ground. However, Tarlow and Beckerman set up a satellite system that allowed the Maharishi to teach worldwide from his mountaintop headquarters in Switzerland. Tarlow also developed a very inexpensive radio receiver for Nepal, through which the Maharishi taught meditation to 10,000 people at the request of the country’s leader. He developed the “Buddha Chair,” a low-slung chair that allows the user to sit comfortably in the lotus position.

Tarlow still teaches TM and meditates to clear his mind. “It’s all there on tape,” Tarlow says of the Maharishi’s teachings. “He’s got ten thousand hours on videotape. He wanted to create a suitcase of knowledge so you could go anywhere in the world, set that thing open, and make that knowledge available to anyone. That’s one of his visions.

“So when I make my million,” he laughs, “I’ll deliver it for him. Right now, I’ve got to make a living.” When the strain of life in one of the Maharishi’s communes got too difficult for Tarlow’s wife and young son, the family left for Southern California. Tarlow ended up at a design company in Beverly Hills, still tinkering, but with a different goal: to make money for Ronco, the now-bankrupt company famous for selling cheap gadgets on television. Tarlow Spent three years designing a dozen products for Ronco, including the Food Dehydrator and Mr. Dentist.

Ronco got its name from a guy named Ron. “Ron was a real piece of work,” Tarlow said of his old boss, Ron Popiel. “He was a good-looking guy, kind of Paul Newmanish, so he always had women falling all over him. But he was a hard-driving guy. He worked one assistant so hard that the guy had a heart attack. But he didn’t die. Ron’s reaction was, ‘I almost hot him.’”

Tarlow knew exactly what he was doing for Ron: designing cut-rate products for maximal gain. According to Tarlow, Ronco’s cheapness was a pity because some great ideas went into the products. “They were marginal products, but many of them have gone on to become whole industries. He did a little vacuum thing to get the crumbs off your table way before Dustbuster, but he did a crummy job. So black and Decker came along and did it right. Before that, they were a second-tier drill manufacturer, and that one product put them on the map to the point where they bought out GE’s consumer products division. [Ron] was onto things, but he wasn’t willing to take them to the level of quality and functionality so they’d be serious. “It got to the point where you remember that “Saturday Night Live’ skit for the Bass-O-Matic, where they dropped that fish in [a blender] and pulverized it? And he drank it. They called it ‘Wrongco.’ I was working with Ron at the time and he was offended. He said, let’s try to make better products. We tried to make better products, but… they had to cost less and less.

“He bought this hundred-and-fifty-dollar food dehydrator at a health food store. He set it on the desk and said, ‘This could be hot…but I want it to do more than just dehydrate food, and I want to retail it for around eighteen dollars. ‘His margin from manufactured cost to final retail was five or six to one. So it would have to cost like three dollars and fifty cents to manufacture.”

Tarlow’s search for cheap parts took him to a state-run Communist factory in Hungary, selling him three million light bulbs to sue the dehydrators for a trifling sum. Ron’s desires were fulfilled, and the food dehydrator sold millions.

Tarlow stopped working for Ronco in 1983. He says Ronco went bankrupt, but eventually, Popiel bought back his surplus Ronco merchandise and sold it off. Then Popiel became the father of the infomercial, first selling the hair-simulating spray paint that covers up bald spots, and now the “Popiel Pasta Maker.”

I wanted to know whether Tarlow had any role in creating the world-famous Veg-O-Matic. “The Veg-O-Matic was actually his father,” said Tarlow. “His father started Popiel Company and did Veg-O-Matic and Pocket Fisherman and a couple others. We called Ron the “Son of Veg-O-Matic.” He desired to outdo his father.

“Ron started his career hawking his father’s product on the boardwalk at Atlantic City. And do you know who was with him? Ed McMahon.”

IN 1985, Tarlow started his own company in Santa Monica, helping people design and market their inventions. Since then, he’s designed such successful products as the Turbo Wash (high-powered jet stream helps you wash out-of-the-way places), the Barbie Claw (for barbecues, not blonde mannequins), Mr. Cool Mug (self-cooling mug and the Fast Track Tie Rack (which revolves at the push of a button). Last year, Tarlow moved to Marin, where he hired his partner Richard Lazovick. Lazovick and Tarlow work together at Tarlow’s Corte Madera home. The garage workshop contains lathes, milling, and drilling machines; the office has inventions in photographs on the walls.

“He’s the mad professor, “Lazovick says of his partner. “He’s the super-active one. He doesn’t have a lot of organization because it’s all going into creativity. I have a background in engineering and an MBA, so I try to put some organization into everything.”

In the past year, Tarlow has developed a host of local clients. Of course, there’s Harold Moen with the Pillow Ease; there’s also the Snail Jail (traps and kills snails without the consumer having to touch snail bait) by Paddy Gallagher of Novato; the Egg Minder (your boiled eggs pop up when they’re done, like a toaster) by Larry Collins of Fairfax, and the Golf Hat (built-in earphones eliminate distractions) by Pat Deering of Petaluma. All these inventions are patented and waiting to be snapped up by a manufacturer. Meanwhile, Tarlow has ambitions. He wants to develop something called Camp Create, a trademarked backwoods camp where amateur inventors can “find out what their genius is.” He’s also marketing a book and tape set, “Mind to Money,” which takes amateur inventors through product development, from coming up with a good idea to selling it to a manufacturer.

If they’re successful, these projects should help create more money for Tarlow himself. But Tarlow does seem to have a genuine desire to help people “follow the little voice inside them,” as he puts it. And he believes that corporations, having cut down on their research-and-development budgets, may be looking to amateur inventors for new products.

“Most of the professionals that develop products, like industrial design firms or engineering firms, are used to working with corporations. The corporations will come in and say they need a new product to add to our line, and they’ll come up with a $100,000 budget. Regular people don’t have that. We’ve tailored ourselves to doing things on a very modest budget.”

MENTOR HELPS TURN IDEAS INTO CASH

By Lateef Mungin, IJ Reporter.



Sizzling hot temperatures over the summer of 1995 inspired Fairfax resident Ted Strauss to develop an idea for a full-body air conditioner that fits around the neck.

Ken Tarlow’s expertise in turning ideas into successful products made Strauss’ idea a reality – and a money-maker.

Tarlow is a Corte Madera inventor who has been mentoring other inventors for the past 14 years through his business, America Invents. In his 25 years working in product design, Tarlow estimates he has helped develop more than 300 consumer products with sales totaling $1 billion.

He helped Strauss design and build a prototype, get a patent, and license his body cooler to national consumer products retailer Sharper Image, selling more than 200,000 devices at $49.50 a pop. Tarlow said that the body cooler can be seen on late-night television commercials and at Sharper Image stores, such as the one in Corte Madera.

“Most people think they have to be some exceptional person to be an inventor,” Tarlow said. “But all you have to have is an idea. People get these ideas and just don’t know what to do with them.”

Tarlow has worked with hundreds of inventors and says about 20 percent of them have ideas that are commercially successful. Unless an inventor has the time and money to manufacture their own product, they must find someone else to do it. That’s not always easy, Tarlow said.

“It takes a long time to locate the right manufacturer and negotiate a licensing agreement,” he said. “Manufacturers usually have a lot on their plates with their own projects.”

That’s why Tarlow does not charge his clients for searching for a manufacturer. However, if he secures a deal, Tarlow asks for 30 percent of the royalties. Tarlow also charges inventors for creating the prototype and guiding them through the patent-writing process.

“I try to keep my rates low because I know I am not dealing with large companies,” he said. Tarlow got much of his experience in product design and manufacturing at large companies he worked for in Southern California. But, he said, he realized that regular people with ideas had nowhere to go with them. That’s when he decided to go into business for himself, helping people bring their ideas to the consumer marketplace.

“I have been a tinkerer all my life, but I never had the time to tinker all the way to the market, ” Strauss said.

David Teller of Mill Valley is one of Tarlow’s clients. With Tarlow’s help, Teller devised a product to prevent sudden infant death syndrome. It attaches to a baby’s diaper and sounds an alarm when the baby rolls on its stomach.

Teller credits Tarlow with helping him create his product. The two are negotiating a licensing contract with a national retail store.

“He is an incredible resource and has high integrity, which we inventors worry about, “Teller said.

Tarlow’s love of new gadgets started at a young age. In the second grade, he designed a flying contraption made from a piece of bamboo and a balloon. He sold them to friends for 5 cents each. His parents turned over the basement of their Long Island home to him for his workshop, where he created go-carts, remote-control cars, and robots.

Now 53, Tarlow still enjoys tinkering and has turned his garage into the office of America Invents. “He has his own office, but still, a lot of his work spills into the house,” said his wife, Gail. She said being the wife of an inventor is exciting but added there are downsides.

“The best part about being the wife of an inventor is when he needs a piece from one of our appliances to complete an invention," she said sarcastically. “For a while, we had a hair dryer that did not get warm and a VCR that could not rewind because he needed the parts. I get two of everything now.”

Ken Tarlow will be on hand at the Marin County Fair this weekend, Showing slides of Marin inventors and trying to drum up business.

“I will be waving the flag, letting people know that I am in business,” Tarlow said. “If people have an idea, we can talk about it. Maybe we can make it happen.”