This story appears in the March 2, 2014 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
John Nottingham and John Spirk are the most successful inventors you've never heard of, with a can't-lose business model that would make
The closest thing in America to Thomas Edison's New Jersey laboratory is a decommissioned Christian Science church in Cleveland. It's here that John Nottingham, John Spirk and their team of 70 inventors, tinkerers and support staff have cooked up the Swiffer SweeperVac, Crest Spinbrush, Dirt Devil vacuum and nearly 1,000 other patented products. No, nothing as momentous as the lightbulb or the phonograph, but in their nearly anonymous way--even in Ohio, almost no one has heard of them--Nottingham and Spirk have proven themselves as good at making money as the Wizard of Menlo Park himself.
"We're probably responsible for more patents than any other company our size," says Nottingham, 64, who in 1972 set himself up in a garage with a college buddy, John Spirk. The most innovative thing about them: their model. Rather than invent products and then figure out how to sell them, à la Edison, the Nottingham Spirk Innovation Center invites corporate behemoths--from
Nottingham Spirk has proven willing to take equity stakes as well. Its biggest score: Dr. John's, which sold electric toothbrushes for $5 (based on a spinning lollipop design) when the going rate was $50. Procter & Gamble bought Dr. John's for $475 million in 2001 (Nottingham and Spirk each walked away with an estimated $40 million on that one). Heady stuff for a guy like Nottingham who, as a college intern, ate lunch by the pond of the
He returned to school for his final year at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he told his first-year hall mate John Spirk about his new dream--reinventing the world's largest companies rather than joining one of them. After graduation GM came knocking with a job opening for Nottingham, and Huffy Bicycles had one for Spirk. They rejected the offers and became co-CEOs of their own shop instead.
"There's a famous Bill Gates quote. They asked him where does he worry about competition from," says Spirk, 65. "They're thinking all these high-tech, you know, and he says I worry about two guys in a garage. So what do we do? We graduated school, and two guys moved into a garage."
Their big break came when they approached Rotodyne, an Ohio manufacturer that mainly made bedpans using a cheap-plastic shaping process called rotational molding. Nottingham and Spirk helped the company use its rotational molding process to make not only bedpans but also cheap toys for children. The bedpan company shifted its focus and created a new brand: Little Tikes, whose indestructible red-and-yellow cars have become inescapable landmarks of toddler culture in backyards across America.
Nottingham and Spirk moved out of the garage and took up residence in two facilities, one in an old brownstone where they came up with their ideas and another in a factory where they manufactured them. Eventually they outgrew those facilities, too, and started shopping for a new home. In 2005 they found it: the Christian Science church just down the road from their old art school. Architecturally significant with its rotunda sanctuary and 5,001-piece organ, the building is on the National Register of Historic Places.
But what excited Nottingham and Spirk most about the space was something more practical than its beauty. The basement Sunday school space could be renovated into a prototyping factory, which would allow them to merge two facilities into one, bringing their entire innovation process under one roof.
The process starts in a research lab in the church's basement. Designers, engineers and prototype builders crowd into a small room on one side of a two-way mirror and watch through the glass as consumers use products like, say, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. They take notes on potential problems, such as how sick people usually take two teaspoons instead of the suggested two tablespoons, underdosing themselves.
The designers then go to work on a solution: for instance, a dosage cup that fits onto the top of the Pepto-Bismol bottle. The product is built in an expansive prototype workshop, complete with industrial-grade saws, paint rooms and 3-D printers. Clients walk away with a patent plus a prototype they can send straight to a manufacturer. Sales climbed 30% in the year after Pepto-Bismol introduced a cap that measures dosage, and the design is now ubiquitous on medicine bottles.
Nottingham anticipates bigger results ("billion-dollar potential, plus, plus, plus") from the firm's latest play: HealthSpot, a kiosk that comes with pull-out medical instruments and a high-definition screen that allows for remote, yet face-to-face, medical appointments. It would be the kind of product that Edison would approve of--a game changer for a huge chunk of the world. And it would all emanate from a Cleveland church basement. Says Nottingham: "I see a sea change coming back to the Midwest."
Forbes will be hosting a Reinventing America Summit March 26-28, 2014, which will bring together 300 top industrial executives, entrepreneurs, academics and elected officials who are leading the country’s next Industrial Revolution.
Please join us (more information is here).