The pair headed out, running around to various stores. Eventually they found clear tubing at a tropical fish supply store and with it Howard fashioned a miniaturized prototype of the inverting umbrella. She then set up a small photography studio on the couple's kitchen countertop and took pictures of the device at each step along the way.
“She made a little movie of it,” McDonald says, then they printed out stills, made copies at Kinko's, and fashioned a flip book. McDonald was armed with this book, her miniature prototype and her sketches when she showed up for round two in January of this year.
The contestants were told they could bring family members to the event, so McDonald brought Howard, her aunt who lives with them, and a few friends. This time she had to pitch in front of the show's three judges. “You had to get three yes's, and it looked like I was only getting two. Then one of the judges, Ed Evangelista, who actually ended up being my mentor, made the final judgment that I'd go through to the next round.” But he warned her, “When you come back, you'd better have more than you have now.”
As one of the top 50, McDonald then had until mid-February to produce something. She put out a call via Craigslist and word of mouth, hoping to come up with a real, working prototype. “I worked with this guy who is also an inventor over a period of two weeks. The best I could do was a mock-up.” It was about five feet long. “It was ridiculous. Totally inappropriate, but it proved the point that it could reverse,” McDonald says of the oversized mock-up. It impressed the judges and McDonald was selected as one of the top 24 contestants.
At that point the contestants were interviewed on camera with their family members. “I was reluctant to come out,” McDonald says. “I'm out to every single person that's ever met me, but because ABC is owned by Disney, which is very conservative, I didn't know if that would be okay.” But with assurance from show executives McDonald decided to be open about her family life.
“They interviewed Denise and talked about how we got married in Hawaii last year,” McDonald recalls. “They let me celebrate our anniversary there. So being out wasn't really a problem.”
McDonald made it to the top 12. She and the other contestants were sequestered for seven weeks and awarded $50,000 to hire a design team and move forward with their inventions. Of her team McDonald says: “What they accomplished in that period of time was pretty much unheard of, because they had to recreate a whole new umbrella. They had to make it reverse and close into a dry tube-like canister.”
Unfortunately McDonald didn't make it to the final round, but she's proud of how far she made it: “It was an amazing process. Sometimes now I just scratch my head and can't believe what I accomplished.” She is impressed that five of the top twelve contestants were women. “Unfortunately none of us made it into the top four,” McDonald says, “but I really want to encourage women to invent and to create, because it is such an incredible experience.”
The eventual winner was Janusz Liberkowski, a mechanical engineer who won $1 million for his Spherical Safety Seat—a child car seat made of nesting spheres that spin to protect the child from the force of an impact.
McDonald has been moving forward with her project and plans for it to hit store shelves in time for the winter holidays in 2007. “So that's where I am now. I still don't have a job but my partner is encouraging me to make this my full-time job, so that's what I'm doing.” The show has brought McDonald so much notoriety that she nearly stole the spotlight at a recent cocktail party in Tribeca for one of Howard's films.
McDonald has seen negative comments about each of the show's top 12 inventors on various blogs and has gotten mixed responses from the many people she talks to about her invention. “I've gotten everything from people saying ‘I would never buy that' to ‘that's ridiculous' to ‘that's ingenious,'” she says. “But you take the good from the bad. Because you can only grow from the bad.”
She thinks people should persevere, no matter what feedback they get. “In the beginning I sold my product with nothing more than an idea and a sketch, which people are telling me is kind of impressive. I was able to sell something just on my idea.”
One American Inventor viewer, a gay man from Pennsylvania, recently tracked McDonald down, but not only because he loved her invention. “He was so thrilled to see two women in a loving relationship that he was moved to send a card,” she says.
In the end she says she has learned that “You can't judge other people's inventions, because they came up with it for a reason and you never know whose life they might be touching.”
Learn more about Sheryl McDonald and the In-brella at In-brella.com
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