Charles Scales’ perseverance leads to invention of EasySpot
L.C. LEACH III | CONTRIBUTOR
Inventor: Charles Scales, president and CEO, Greenville Office Supply
Invention: The EasySpot
Patent: US 6523970 B1
What it does: “The EasySpot is about a foot long with a male screw base at one end, and a light-bulb socket at the other end. The middle part is flexible, like that of a caterpillar. You screw in the base to an outlet, then bend the fixture around a downspout, or to shine light wherever you want it.”
Inspiration: “I was looking at the downspouts on my home and other homes and I found the same problem: The lights over the gutters were shining down into the gutters, not throwing the light where it needed to go. So I thought, ‘There’s got to be a way to get light around the downspout without having an electrician rewire the house.’ That’s how the EasySpot came about.”
Obstacle: ““Getting UL [Underwriters Laboratories] approval is very, very difficult when you’re a one-man band. I would send them a prototype, they would deny it, and I’d have to fix what they said was wrong with it, then send it back again. And it was very expensive every time I did this. There were no investors in this – it was all money out of my own pocket. It took three times and 18 months of remaking the product before I got UL approval.”
Available at: Lowe’s stores. “I got an appointment with someone in their home office in [Mooresville] North Carolina, and showed him the product. They weren’t interested, didn’t even want to look at it, and that was a little disheartening… After some time passed, I got to thinking, ‘Maybe I just didn’t meet with the right person at Lowe’s.’ So I tried them again. I had become friends with one of the procurement assistants up in the home office, and … she gave me another name, saying that this idea might be more in line with their decorative lighting. So I met with another representative, and this guy loved the idea, and said he wanted to test the product in 30-40 stores. Today it’s in about 650 of their stores nationwide.”
