Imagine a wedding dress made entirely of icing. Michele Hester did - complete with elaborate lace bustier and sleeves, flouncy skirt and a huge bow that looks like satin.
It's all made of sugar and eggs, a concoction she calls SugarVeil that's more commonly used for elaborate cakes and other edibles.
The Waldron, Mo., woman also invented a way to paint on silk. And an easier way to create that popular ragged denim - so handy that it was used for the costumes in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" and "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events."
And after years of cold calls to chief executive officers and hours on her feet at trade shows selling her inventions, a remarkable thing happened. Martha Stewart came by.
Out of more than 3,000 booths at the Craft and Hobby World's Fair in Anaheim, Calif., in January, Hester received the Most Innovative Product award and Best of Show. Maybe that was what got Stewart's attention. Maybe it was the outrageous hot pink and black decorations.
Whatever the reason, Stewart came to the booth, took home some of that super flexible icing and mentioned that she'd like to have SugarVeil on her television show and in Weddings magazine.
It's the kind of attention every inventor dreams of.
The process that creates such products is "like a carnival in my head," Hester says. "I have always only been interested in original ideas."
The urge to invent is not unusual. The U.S. Patent Office saw 416,000 applications last year. The drive to make a product work, to patent it and to sell it to a company that will use it and pay a royalty, is. Even rarer is the persistence it takes to somehow make people understand how it might benefit their art, business or hobby.
On a warm, sunny day some weeks ago, an experiment was under way in Hester's refrigerator.
Plates of whipped cream in the fridge were neatly labeled, each decorated with designs made of SugarVeil. Each label indicated the specifics of the materials on the plate. Hester's experiment proved that SugarVeil doesn't run when applied to the soft material. It also survived freezing and thawing, another selling point.
The project was much more organized than the way some new things come to be at Hester's house. In its infancy, SugarVeil hung in sheets from chairs, cabinets, the sofa and any other surface that would support it. Her husband, Jake Otto, had seen what Hester calls her "compulsion paths" before. She pondered and rejected formulas until she found the consistency and flexibility she wanted for what she believes is the first new form of icing to come along in about 400 years. SugarVeil is not fondant, a sweet, creamy paste often used in candies and icing.
SugarVeil was born of need. Hester was at a convention when she learned that cake decorators and pastry chefs can experience carpal tunnel syndrome, the result of hours of repetitive work involving wrists and hands. She also overheard two people affirm that "everything with sugar has been done before." That was challenge enough. She decided to invent an icing that required fewer twists and turns by the chef to make each design.
If you ask Hester what she does for a living, she'll patiently explain that she creates and licenses intellectual properties.
What's going on in her kitchen is part of a discipline she uses when inventing.
"In my case, first I get interested in a particular industry and begin to learn about that industry, maybe getting a few initial ideas.
"Next, I ask a lot of questions - talk to people active in the industry, attend trade shows for that industry and find out needs that exist, read trade magazines and technical papers." She decides if the ground is fertile for the idea or adapts the idea to fill a need.
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