Springfree Trampoline: Keith Alexander & Steve Holmes

In the late 1980s, a New Zealand engineer named Keith Alexander wanted to buy a trampoline for his kids. After his wife said trampolines were too dangerous, Keith set out to design his own — a safer trampoline, without metal springs. He tinkered with and perfected the design over the course of a decade. But he was daunted by the challenge of bringing his invention to market — and he almost gave up. At that point Steve Holmes, a Canadian businessman, bought the patent to Keith's trampoline, and took a big risk to commercialize it. Today, Springfree Trampoline generates over $50 million in annual sales and has sold over 400,000 trampolines. PLUS in our postscript, "How You Built That," how Cyndi and Chris Hileman created a candle in a planter pot that can later be used to grow wildflowers. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  I decided to invest in some fundamental research, and I wanted to answer myself one question. Did any retailer in America believe that trampolines were dangerous? And so dangerous that they wouldn't sell them? The answer was yes, and that was Costco. The CEO of Costco was a man named Jim Senegal, and Jim said, "I will not sell trampolines."

• 0:24Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  And so I made it my mission to try and sell Costco a trampoline.

• 0:34Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 0:48Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how a shy New Zealand professor with a crazy invention and a Canadian businessman who believed in its potential teamed up to create Springfree, what they call the world's safest backyard trampoline.

• 1:08Guy Raz?

  So you might remember a while back, we did an interview with James Dyson. And Dyson, of course, is the inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner. And he described how he came up with his vacuum. He worked in his backyard shed. He built prototype after prototype after prototype, testing and perfecting his invention. And for a lot of inventors, that's a familiar story, right? Finding a problem, tinkering until, finally, a solution. But the next part of the Dyson story, the part where James Dyson manufactured the vacuum cleaner, scaled his business, and then became one of the wealthiest people in the UK? Well, that's not exactly the typical inventor story.

• 1:50Guy Raz?

  Because for a lot of inventors, the end goal is the patent, the patent that someone else will buy and take to market. Because a lot of times, inventors don't have the time, or resources, or ability to go into business themselves. So today on the show, we're going to do something a little different. We're actually going to tell two stories. The story of one man, Keith Alexander, who invented a safer trampoline, maybe even the safest trampoline ever. And then the story of Steve Holmes, the man who took that invention and made it into a commercial success. Because even though Steve and Keith aren't technically business partners, spring-free trampoline couldn't have been a success without one or the other.

• 2:34Guy Raz?

  Keith Alexander grew up in New Zealand. His dad was an engineer. And at first, Keith wasn't really sure what he wanted to do with his life. So he joined New Zealand's version of the Peace Corps, and for a while, he worked as a grade school teacher. But then, he decided to go back to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and he found that he actually really enjoyed engineering.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yes, I started doing my engineering degree at Canterbury and suddenly realized that was what I loved. I wish somebody had told me many years before that I was actually an engineer. I found I could get As there quite easily. So I did a master's and then did a PhD.

• 3:13Guy Raz?

  And were you like, were you the kind of engineer who just always loved to tinker in like a tool shed? Like, were you always tinkering away at things?

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Well, yes, I was always tinkering, especially through my PhD and had to have a workshop.

• 3:25Guy Raz?

  You always had a workshop?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Always had a workshop.

• 3:27Guy Raz?

  You were like a bench with tools and equipment?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  That's right, a bench. I put up a bench somewhere if it wasn't there. I had these tool racks that I made with all the tools on, and I could take them off the wall, pack them up, take them somewhere.

• 3:39Guy Raz?

  What would you do? What would you make?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Well, I made all sorts of things. Did an art exhibition. I made a six-foot mousetrap for that art exhibition, a collapsing chair. I made walk-on-water shoes. In fact, I funded myself through my PhD by winning walk-on-water competitions.

• 3:55Guy Raz?

  Wait, sorry. Let's break this down a bit. What's a walk-on-water shoes?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Walk-on-water shoes, Radio Avon, which was the radio in Christchurch at the time, put up this competition, a walk-on-water competition, $1,000 prize.

• 4:08Guy Raz?

  Wait, to what? Sorry. They said to their audience, hey, we have a competition. If you can figure out how to walk on water, we'll give you $1,000.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  That's about it. That's about it.

• 4:17Guy Raz?

  Okay. Wow.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  At that time, my father had been developing some walk-on-water shoes in Auckland. He and I had been playing around with it because we had a dinghy, and we'd been figuring out how to do this. So that's a tinkering in the garage. You need some flotation.

• 4:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  The competition put limits on on how big these flotation things could be.

• 4:37Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  It ended up being you weren't allowed to have anything longer than one meter. And it was didn't take much for an engineer to work out how big the piece of polystyrene had to be so you could carry your whole weight.

• 4:48Guy Raz?

  I see. Okay, so you you were coming up with some kind of flotation device that you could put on your feet and you could sort of walk on water with that device that was balanced, that would allow you to kind of, you know, hover on the surface of the water.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that balance thing is is the first.

• 5:03Guy Raz?

  That's tricky.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  The first big step. And the solution is put your feet on the bottom. So you cut a hole in it and you put a bit of plywood on the bottom so your feet go right through to the bottom and then it stays upright.

• 5:15Guy Raz?

  Oh, so the polystyrene is around your ankles?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 5:18Guy Raz?

  And you invented this?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Yes, my father and I invented this. We had to make it fit the competition for that. So I I flew back from Auckland where I'd gone to stay with my parents and I built these shoes to compete in this competition. And I managed to win the competition two years in a row and then won a third one in Auckland and that helped fund my PhD.

• 5:40Guy Raz?

  Because you got a thousand bucks?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Yep, back then a thousand bucks was quite a lot more, it's more like five thousand now.

• 5:46Guy Raz?

  Wow. So what were some other things that you came up with or you tried to invent?

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Well, for the art exhibition, we had, there was quite a few there. One of my enduring experiences was having a haircut during my PhD at university and this young ditzy lady was giving me the haircut and she said, do you realize you're thinning on top? It was really embarrassing, so I thought that would be a good thing for young guys to have because you can never see the top of your head. So I made this board patch inspector, that's what I called it. It was a couple of mirrors, so you look in one mirror and you can see in the other mirror and you could move the levers and it would adjust the mirror so you could see the top of your head.

• 6:25Guy Raz?

  You could stand in front of the mirror, move a lever, it would reflect the other mirror and it could show you the top of your head?

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Exactly, and you could see whether you're going bald.

• 6:35Guy Raz?

  So what did you do once you finished your PhD?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Well, at first I thought if I want to come back and do academic life, I really need some engineering experience. I don't think I'm a valid teacher of engineering unless I've got some engineering experience.

• 6:49Guy Raz?

  So with a PhD, you decide I've got to go out into the world and get some experience before I can come back and teach.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely, that's right. So I moved back to Auckland and got a job in an engineering consultancy.

• 7:03Guy Raz?

  What kind of work did you do?

• 7:05Speaker 02

  I started off as a valuer. They wanted a valuer.

• 7:07Guy Raz?

  What is that?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  I knew nothing about what valuation was.

• 7:10Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  It was looking at a piece of machinery and working out how much it costs.

• 7:14Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  How old it is.

• 7:15Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  And after two weeks, I was getting pretty good at it.

• 7:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  After two weeks, they found I could do other things as well. Working for a consultancy got a variety of things. There was quite a bit of insurance work. There was crash investigations. There was a bit of court work as well. So it was quite a broad range of stuff. But I wasn't particularly happy with that because it all comes down to the money. In the end, it's all how much have you been able to invoice this week?

• 7:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  And I really like spending time on things, putting more time into it and thinking it through properly.

• 7:47Guy Raz?

  This is like, I guess, the mid 1980s. You were late 30s, early 40s.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:55Guy Raz?

  Were you married?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  I got married in 1985, yes. So it was while I was at the engineering consultancy in Auckland.

• 8:01Guy Raz?

  And did you have kids pretty soon after?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yes, about two and a half years later, 1987.

• 8:08Guy Raz?

  Your first child was born?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  First child was born.

• 8:10Guy Raz?

  How many kids do you have?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  We've got three.

• 8:13Guy Raz?

  So my assumption is you are doing consulting work, got a young family, and this is probably a pretty steady lifestyle, like, right?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:25Guy Raz?

  So when you would come home from your consultancy, consulting job, Would you come home and go into the workbench area and tinker and build things?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Much to the regret of my wife, yes. It took her a while to get used to that.

• 8:41Guy Raz?

  So you were like the mad scientist in the back of the garden working on your crazy ideas?

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Not all the time, not all the time. One of the early ones was a magnetic flying machine, which was supposed to use the earth's magnetic field to fly. But I was very proud of what I did, but it didn't work.

• 8:59Guy Raz?

  Do the laws of physics actually support that idea?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Yes, in the end, one of the best ideas would be to go to the south magnetic pole and put a big ring of conductor material around the magnetic field there and put a huge current through it and it would actually fly into space.

• 9:15Guy Raz?

  Wow, but it's kind of hard to get there.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not a very good place for a spaceport.

• 9:20Guy Raz?

  It sounds to me that what really motivated you was just this idea of trying to solve problems. Is that right? Is that how you would explain it?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  That's pretty good, yes. If other people haven't been able to solve it, I want to solve it. That's a real challenge for me. That's something that excites me. No one else has done this. I want to do this because no one else has done it.

• 9:43Guy Raz?

  So, okay, so what was it that eventually made you start thinking trampolines?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Well, when I was a kid, I'd love the trampoline. I just loved the idea of being in the air, but you couldn't buy a trampoline in those days unless it was a gymnastics trampoline. And we had one at the school and in the gym class, you get 30 kids there, and we had to get on, jump, three bounces, seat drop, get off, the next person. That was it. That was my jumping.

• 10:10Guy Raz?

  And you loved this thing?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  And I loved this thing.

• 10:12Guy Raz?

  You could only get three jumps?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that really frustrated me. So when they started to become available in the shops, and I had a young child, I thought, right, we've got to get one of these.

• 10:23Guy Raz?

  Of course.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Of course. She's only 18 months old. But, you know, let's start her young and then I'll be able to bounce on it, too. And so I said to my wife, you know, we've got to get a trampoline for Katie. And she said, no, I take it to play center. They don't have a trampoline at play center. They're just too dangerous.

• 10:40Guy Raz?

  And this is in like nineteen eighty nine?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  This is nineteen eighty nine, yes. And she said trampolines are not safe. I think, all right, well, I'll just prove her wrong. I'll look at the research and see what I can find. So I looked at the research and sure enough, even in New Zealand, there'd been some research done on the increase in injuries from trampolines. And I thought, well, they really are dangerous. Maybe I can do something about it. I'm an engineer, I should be able to do something about this. And that's, that's when it started.

• 11:07Guy Raz?

  So you look at this research and you, you, you realize your wife was right. Trampolines were not safe.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Damn it, my, my wife is right.

• 11:14Guy Raz?

  She's right.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Damn it.

• 11:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:15Guy Raz?

  But you wanted a trampoline and you wanted one for your daughter.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  So I had to think of a way around that.

• 11:21Guy Raz?

  So what'd you do?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  So I thought, right, well, if I can design one, I'm, I'm sure a trampoline is pretty simple. Surely I can design, I've got a PhD in engineering.

• 11:29Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  And I love designing things like this. I'll surely I'll be able to do it. So let's design one that she'll accept. And maybe we could even sell it, I don't know.

• 11:38Guy Raz?

  So, so take me back to that moment. You're thinking, I want to see if I can come up with a trampoline. Where do you start? I mean, do you, there's no internet at the time. I mean, there's no easily available internet. So how did you even start to think about how you would do this?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Right, so I've got to come up with a trampoline. Well, what are the issues here that we have to solve? And, and the traditional trampoline has got a steel bar around the outside edge and springs right beside it. And then, then the mat that you jump on in the middle. And I can see that it's dangerous because the accident rates have gone up. And it's pretty obvious. You give this nice bouncy things to kids and, and they'll bounce all over it and they'll lose control and they'll fall on the bar or they'll fall down the hole between the springs, so.

• 12:21Guy Raz?

  Or they fall off.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Or they fall off. But the thing they'll probably hit first is the steel bar around the edge. That's the thing that impressed me most. I thought, that steel bar, that's not fair. Let's see if we can get rid of that steel bar. That, that's a good step. So I'm thinking, well, inflatable things are soft. Why don't we replace the steel frame with an inflatable ring? Just like a big inner tube and then stretch the trampoline mat across the top of that. Would that work?

• 12:47Guy Raz?

  Oh, I see, like a giant, heavy-duty inner tube tire. And then you would have like a canvas inside of it and the springy part would come from the inner tube?

• 12:56Speaker 02

  At first I thought, right, well, put springs on. I mean, we can put rope around there to hold the springs and we could have the mat connected to the springs. So I sketched this up and I got a canvas company to make a mat for me. And I got some trampoline springs and some rope. I borrowed, they called it a sea biscuit at the time, which is like a big inflatable.

• 13:14Guy Raz?

  Like a Zodiac, but circular.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. And you towed it behind the boat. That's what it was for. So I borrowed one of those from the canvas company, actually. Tried it out and it seemed to work. At that time, my son was about two and a half years old and he bounced on it. He could bounce on it all right. It was only about the height of a chair. So if a kid fell off, they didn't have far to go and the edge was inflatable and soft.

• 13:40Guy Raz?

  Inflatable rubber. So you actually literally made this. You stretched canvas over this giant rubber tire boat dinghy thing? And you had your kids jump on it?

• 13:51Speaker 02

  That's right. So that's the first one. Then I thought, right, well, let's make a purpose-built one. So the one that we formally made, and I paid a couple of thousand dollars for, just had the mat sewn into the top edge of this big ring. And that was good for the kids at the time.

• 14:08Guy Raz?

  And your wife was happy with that? She was totally comfortable with it?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  She was really happy with that. This is something the kids could actually pick up and cart around the backyard.

• 14:17Guy Raz?

  And this was like, how big was it?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  That was about eight feet across.

• 14:21Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  The mat, of course, was more like five feet because it was on the top of it. The big problem with it, well, several big problems. Number one, the material cost for that was about eight hundred dollars. Back at that time, just the material costs. So there's no manufacturing in that at all. And it always leaked. There's always some where there's-

• 14:42Guy Raz?

  The air would come out?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yes, it was supposed to be airtight. It didn't matter how many times I'd pull it apart and try to find the leak. So there was a problem, two problems there. Third problem, it just wasn't bouncy. I mean, I couldn't get any height on it.

• 14:56Guy Raz?

  This did not bring you back to your school days where you had those three jumps?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 15:00Guy Raz?

  Those massive, giant jumps.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Where you could get lots of air and you could go, "I'm flying."

• 15:05Guy Raz?

  A foot off the ground, maybe. Twelve inches or something off the ground.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Which is pretty safe for kids. You don't really want them-

• 15:10Guy Raz?

  No, you don't.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  When they're three years old, you don't want them jumping too high. So it was great. It was great for the kids to have it. But it wasn't what I wanted.

• 15:18Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you start to realize that this thing is just not gonna fly. This is not gonna be the thing that, I mean, it could be fun for a while for the kids, but it gets deflated and it can't jump very high. And anyway, you can't market this thing. So what do you do? Do you go back to your, to the garage and start again?

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Well, around about that time, I sat down and summarized all the sketches I'd gotten, all the ideas I got. Cause this is not bouncy. I've got to come up with other ways of doing it. And I went through a whole range of ideas and came up with several quite complicated ways of using springs. So at this stage, I was working at the university.

• 15:58Guy Raz?

  You got a job at the University of Canterbury-

• 15:59Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 16:00Guy Raz?

  In Christchurch.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  In Christchurch.

• 16:02Guy Raz?

  Teaching mechanical engineering, I'm assuming?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Yes. I had a contract, only a contract. It wasn't a full-time job, so I didn't have tenure. But I had a job there and that meant that I could, for educational purposes, give students projects to do.

• 16:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  So the final year of engineering, the students get an individual project that would go the whole year. So I put that up as a project. Here's an idea for making a trampoline completely differently with springs in a different way. What can you do as a student? What can you come up with?

• 16:31Guy Raz?

  So just to get a sense of what this is, we're talking about the mid 1990s here, right? Like 95, 96, somewhere around then?

• 16:38Speaker 02

  I started at university in 96. I ran a couple of university projects in ninety six, ninety seven. And I gave them pretty close guidelines because I put a lot of thought into it. Here's a way I think we could do it. Could you build one? Could you do the analysis on it? And at that time, I had this idea in my mind and I found it very difficult to imagine. I've never seen anything like it. It was a bit like a basket with the, these are, these are things, say, like fishing rods. Obviously, if you caught a fish on the end of a fishing, with a fishing rod, that's going to bend. It's, it'll keep some tension on.

• 17:12Guy Raz?

  Flexible, sure.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  It's flexible, keep some tension on. Maybe I could make one like that.

• 17:15Guy Raz?

  With them out of that material.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Out of something like fiberglass, like a fishing rod material. And I thought, well, if you stuck a fishing rod in the ground over there and you stuck another one over here and you tied something between them, you get the tension, but then they're sticking up. These things are sticking straight up. And if you're on a trampoline on the top and you fell on it, because they're vertical, if you fell right on the edge, you could impale yourself on them. So what if we laid them over so that they're forty five degrees? Then if you landed on them, they'd bend out. So that was the idea.

• 17:45Guy Raz?

  So just to picture this in my mind, the idea was, could you get some kind of material that's like a fishing rod, like a, but shorter, obviously?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:52Guy Raz?

  And, and angle it at forty five degrees in a circle, let's say, and stretch canvas over that? And essentially, that would be the trampoline. You would bounce on the canvas that was laid over these angled rods that were bendy.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  That, that's a pretty good description of it.

• 18:13Guy Raz?

  So you had students working on, on making a, like a prototype of this new trampoline design. But by the, how big are these things?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  They made full sized ones, eight foot diameter.

• 18:24Guy Raz?

  And, and how did it work using, using those like fiberglass fishing rods?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  The fiberglass rods, that, that seemed to work all right. That seemed to work all right. It was certainly, it was more bouncy than the inflatable one. So I was going in the right direction.

• 18:36Guy Raz?

  It had more promise. It wasn't exactly there yet, but it had more promise.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Yes, you're right. I, I was thinking, I need to get a commercial person involved about this stage. I don't know how to commercialize it. I don't know whether it's going to be commercial at all. I had no idea. Let's contact someone.

• 18:51Guy Raz?

  All right. I, I want to ask you about. What I would imagine was a slight complication, which is at this point, you weren't Keith Alexander backyard tinkerer. You were also Keith Alexander professor at this university. What did that mean about all the work you did? Right, because oftentimes, as is the case in the US, when you work on something, the university, it's their property. If it's MIT or Stanford or Harvard or whatever.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Well, that's exactly right. What I'm supposed to be doing is publishing papers.

• 19:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  But they did have this new policy that just came in. Couple of months after I'd started, they said, if you come up with an idea that's commercializable, you've got to tell this new commercialization office that we've just developed that you've done it because it belongs to the university.

• 19:40Guy Raz?

  A hundred percent.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  And I thought, well, I have already thought of this. I've been doing this at home for a while. And now I've got a job at the university. Well, I can't commercialize it. I don't know how to do that. They say they know how to do it.

• 19:53Guy Raz?

  Fine, I'll sign the paper.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  I'll sign the paper.

• 19:55Guy Raz?

  So now every idea you have, they own, which is not uncommon.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  It's not uncommon. So I went along with that. I'll let them have it. If they can commercialize it, great. So I took it to them, showed them. They said, oh, that's fine. That's a kid's toy. See what we can do.

• 20:10Guy Raz?

  And but in the meantime, they they were just like, yeah, do whatever you want to do. They, yeah, they were not paying attention to you.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  They're not paying attention. That what they wanted is something that's going to make millions of dollars. They don't really want a child's toy.

• 20:23Guy Raz?

  They want like a biotech something.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  Nanotech.

• 20:27Guy Raz?

  Nanotech.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Nanotech at the time was the thing.

• 20:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  I was competing with nanotech.

• 20:31Guy Raz?

  They're like, enjoy your kid's trampoline. We're paying attention to these guys working on nanotech.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I looked in the Yellow Pages. I found the biggest trampoline manufacturer in New Zealand. He was selling 400 trampolines a year. I rang him up and he said, yeah, I'm interested. Send me some photos. I'll be in Christchurch. I'll come and have a look. So he came and I had them all there for him to try and have a look at.

• 20:53Guy Raz?

  He jumped on them?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  He jumped on them. He said, well, that inflatable one, I like that, but not as a trampoline. I like, it's a great pool toy. The one with the rods, yeah, that's got some promise. But it's too low. It's got to be high, it's got to be dangerous. It's got to make the kids think it's dangerous. And it's got to be bigger, it's far too small. So I want something that's ten feet diameter.

• 21:15Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  And it's got to pack down so it can be shipped. So you have to be able to pull it all apart and assemble it. And it's got to be able to be assembled by a solo mother with no tools in half an hour on Christmas Eve after she's had a glass of wine.

• 21:30Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Because I always get people ringing me up on Christmas Eve saying, how do I assemble my trampoline? So you've got to sort that out. So if you can sort out those problems, I'll be interested.

• 21:39Guy Raz?

  And you thought?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  And I thought, okay, there's a challenge. And we've got a company now that's interested. And I'll pay one of these students who was happy to work over summer to build this ten-foot version and see what we can do. So that's what we did. Over the next year, we had this student working away. He built up this ten-foot trampoline that was higher. We could test it, we could pull it apart, put it together again. We could put it all into boxes. We couldn't assemble it in half an hour. But all the other things we could do. And we found that there was another company in New Zealand that was quite a specialist in poultry to fiberglass. In fact, they had used it as a spring and we were using it as a spring.

• 22:22Guy Raz?

  Fiberglass springs.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  And they experienced that. So we started forming a relationship with them. So we formed a relationship with them and this company who were making four hundred trampolines a year. And we started to build some prototypes for customer trials, five prototypes for customer trials.

• 22:41Guy Raz?

  And how did it turn out?

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Well, it was, I was pretty pleased with it. I thought we were going to market at this stage because I had a commercial person. We had five products with customer trials. And the guys from the commercial arm of the university came along to have a look because there was a bit of tirade going on.

• 23:00Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  They had a look at it and they said, this is not market ready. You need another fifty thousand, a hundred thousand dollars to make it market ready. And then they went away.

• 23:10Guy Raz?

  The university said this?

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:12Guy Raz?

  And so what did that mean?

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Well, I thought that was the end of it, really. I thought, I can't get a hundred thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars. I thought it was market ready, but. I was very depressed.

• 23:25Guy Raz?

  And you needed the university's permission because they owned it? They owned the IP?

• 23:29Speaker 02

  They owned it. I didn't have to do any more. I was doing all this work, supervising this and trying to get the money to support making these customer trials.

• 23:39Guy Raz?

  So the dream dies over.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Well, I thought so. But I always just liked challenges. And my mother-in-law, she'd ring up to talk to my wife. And when she'd get me on the phone, she'd say, "And Keith, how's that trampoline going? I hope you're still working on it." So this was an idea I really wanted to persist with. This was a problem in the world that needed to be solved. Parents can't buy a safe trampoline. I've got to do something about this. I'll decide to keep going. Around this time, the commercial arm of the university hired another person. And he'd actually taken product to market before. And he had a look around New Zealand, trying to find if there are any investors in New Zealand that were interested.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  And in the end, he looked in Canada, found someone in Canada and said, Keith, we've got someone in Canada. I'm going to send him a photo and we'll see where we go from here.

• 24:39Guy Raz?

  When we come back, almost 15 years after Keith started tinkering on a new, safer kind of trampoline, he gets to see his invention finally come to market. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 25:10Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's the early 2000s and Keith's university finds an investor who's interested in the trampoline. And his name is Steve Holmes. And at this point, Steve's in his mid-30s, he's living in Toronto, and he's already been involved in a couple of successful small businesses. So Steve knows some investors and he's got access to a little bit of capital. And eventually, Steve and Keith get on the phone to start discussing the details of Keith's invention.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  At the end of the phone call, I remember saying to Keith, "Okay, Keith, can you mail it to me? Can you send it to me? Ship me the trampoline."

• 25:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  "Just ship me the trampoline." And there was a pause because I think the money was an issue, right? You know, like, how am I going to ship the trampoline? Keith tried to figure it out. I said, I'll send you $10,000. Will you ship me the trampoline? And he said, yeah, I'll ship you the trampoline.

• 26:04Guy Raz?

  So Keith, what do you remember about that call? It was similar, like you were on the phone with Steve and you just kind of explained this invention to him?

• 26:12Speaker 02

  I find it pretty hard to remember. I was really anxious about anything like that, that call would have made me, would have freaked me out.

• 26:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  And shipping something overseas, I didn't even know that you had to dial 001 to get to America first. One of the things that did make an impression, though, was Steve said, I'm sending, I'm sending you guys $10,000 so that you can do what needs to be done to get me information that I need and get me a trampoline. And I didn't have that sort of money. So when someone says, please ship it to the other side of the world, it was a big deal. And when someone says, I'll give you $10,000, that was a big deal.

• 26:47Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so, so how long did it take for it to arrive? A couple of weeks?

• 26:51Speaker 00

  I think it was six weeks in shipping. I can't remember if we airfreighted or not. We, at the time, had a backyard, which really didn't have any grass, so that was a problem. We had a patio. And so when I got it, it was a little overwhelming. So I assembled it. It probably took me about three hours and several bruises. And my kid's interesting, that was at the time, we were 16, 14, and 12. And so my 12-year-old daughter jumped on it and she loved it.

• 27:21Guy Raz?

  All right, so, so she, she's jumping up and down on this thing. And you realize from that, maybe there's something to this?

• 27:31Speaker 00

  You know, when it comes to good ideas, I believe you measure it by the reaction of the people you hope to sell it to. And there wasn't a kid in the neighborhood who didn't want to jump on it.

• 27:41Guy Raz?

  Everybody came to your backyard?

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Well, anybody that we'd let in. And so you you get caught up in the enthusiasm of your kids.

• 27:50Guy Raz?

  So when did like the switch go off in your mind where you thought, OK, I'm in like I need to pursue this thing because at this point you'd sent $10,000 but you did not have a business you were not in business at the university you didn't you didn't own this patent not nothing it was just you just had one really great trampoline in your backyard.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 28:10Guy Raz?

  And and so you had presumably a lot to consider before you were going to invest the money in buying this patent you had to find out how much it would actually cost to manufacture it because you had to model this out whether this was going to be a viable business uh did you do that?

• 28:25Speaker 00

  We did um October of 2002 we had secured the patent with effectively a letter of intent agreement in principle.

• 28:34Guy Raz?

  I see.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  We had locked up some period of time and the first thing we did was we went to the super show in Las Vegas Nevada.

• 28:42Guy Raz?

  Which is like a toy show?

• 28:44Speaker 00

  No, it was it used to be the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association.

• 28:47Guy Raz?

  OK, this is what year was this?

• 28:49Speaker 00

  This was 2000 January of 2003 I went to see what the reaction would be.

• 28:54Guy Raz?

  So you brought you you built one and and you displayed it there?

• 28:57Speaker 00

  We built one we took a prominent spot at the show we hired some dancers from Siegfried and Roy to be our jumpers along with my daughters uh my youngest daughter and her three friends and we just said like this is go big or go home.

• 29:13Guy Raz?

  Did did you I mean how how big was the trampoline market at that point?

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Well, I would have said it was pretty small I I I think that we had measured that we thought that the trampoline market that maybe it was a 500 to 600 million dollar trampoline market globally.

• 29:29Guy Raz?

  So you were looking for a bite out of that 500 to 600 million?

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've never been greedy a small business can be a good business.

• 29:36Guy Raz?

  Absolutely.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  I guess we took a philosophy internally which was to think big but start small and so we tried.

• 29:44Guy Raz?

  And what was a what was a reaction at the show like what did people say to you?

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Well, it was really quite amazing actually we had lots of different reactions the first we had was from a retailer who came up and said well you can't sell this in America you don't have an enclosure and I said well hold on an enclosure isn't mandatory they said yeah but no retailer will sell a trampoline without an enclosure. And then I had somebody come up to me and said you know I have a patent on the enclosure and you'll never sell this product in America ever.

• 30:11Guy Raz?

  Because I have the patent on the enclosure.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  On the enclosure. And then I had the, at the time, the CEO from what was a very large sporting goods retailer come up to me and said, you know, this may be the most innovative product we've seen at the show in years.

• 30:24Guy Raz?

  So you walk out of that show and what are you thinking?

• 30:27Speaker 00

  It's not dead. It's not dead. So I decided to invest in some fundamental research and I wanted to ask myself one question. Did any retailer in America believe that trampolines were dangerous? And so dangerous that they wouldn't sell them?

• 30:43Guy Raz?

  What was the answer?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  The answer was yes, and that was Costco. The CEO of Costco was a man named Jim Senegal, and Jim said, I will not sell trampolines.

• 30:53Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  And so I made it my mission to try and sell Costco a trampoline.

• 30:59Guy Raz?

  Okay, but before we get to Costco.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 31:02Guy Raz?

  So at what point did you say, all right, I'm going in. We're going to get this. We're going to buy the patent and production rights.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  Well, I think we were finished. We had, I was advancing all of this very quickly. I think contractually it was all locked up by probably May of '03.

• 31:15Guy Raz?

  And what did it cost you?

• 31:16Speaker 00

  To be honest, guy, I wouldn't even remember the number.

• 31:20Guy Raz?

  More than a million dollars?

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:24Guy Raz?

  More than a million dollars to buy the patent?

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, to buy everything when everything was all said and done and all the settlements with the university, I think it was, it was probably close to that, yes.

• 31:32Guy Raz?

  Okay, so Keith, you are a professor at the university. You come up with this invention, they sell the patent to Steve, and presumably you get a check for it.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yes, the arrangement with the university was that whatever he paid would be split three ways. So I got a check. And that was huge for me.

• 31:52Guy Raz?

  And I'm curious, at this point, did you, I mean, did you kind of have to deal with the fact that, you know, the rights are sold to someone else and now like this guy Steve is going to make it and like go run with it?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  That's right. And that was a very sobering moment for me. And I thought, yeah, okay, I guess that's the way it is. I guess I can let it go now. I don't feel like it, but I guess that's the way it goes. I've, there's a check coming and I've got to think of other things. And then Steve says, I'm going to need a bit of a helping hand because I don't have any trampoline engineers, so do you mind giving me a hand with this? Give me some technical input. I said, yeah, yeah, fine. Okay.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and, and that came in fairness, you know, Keith and I had a conversation once about risk and reward. And so I asked him, what level of risk are you willing to take versus the economic reward you expect? And he said, well, I, I have, I don't want any risk.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  I don't want any risk. And so we reached an agreement at that point as to what his role would be and how he would be compensated. And, and so it was good.

• 33:03Guy Raz?

  Okay. So Steve, you are running the business from Canada and Keith, you are still in New Zealand consulting on the, I guess, on the engineering side.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:12Guy Raz?

  So what was the next step?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Well, Keith and I created the spring free enclosure and we kept looking at all of the principles of our design and said, it better be soft.

• 33:23Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  It can't be hard. And everybody had produced enclosures with steel poles. And we kept looking at this American patent and saying, we can't infringe this. So we didn't sell any products. We didn't make any products. We just spent a year building an enclosure for the spring.

• 33:39Guy Raz?

  Okay. So you had left that convention in Las Vegas, determined that you had to solve this problem, that if you were going to make this thing as safe as possible, it had to be enclosed.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  That's it. And we decided that we would give ourselves a deadline and the deadline would be the January super show, which was to be held in Orlando, Florida in January of oh four, the 2004 super show.

• 34:01Guy Raz?

  And what, by the way, what made the enclosure different? How were you able to create this thing that was safe?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  So Steve said, we've now got a relationship with the people who make the protruded fiberglass. You've got to make the poles out of those same material. And I said, well, they need to be strong enough to hold this net up. So I thought, well, we can try it. So I had a post grad student who's needed some money. So he's working in our backyard. We got these 12 of these around the trampoline, fitted on and tied the top of them together with, with some cord. Let's see what happens when we put a net on. So I said to this post grad student, you've got to spend the next few days finding some sort of net. Talk to all the fisherman people around the place, see if we can get some net. And after about four days, he'd come back with some fishing net that he lashed on there at the top and the bottom.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  So it was more or less like an enclosure and in a sense, different than the ones that were out there. But it was this really flexible thing. And so then, when I came home from university and the kids were still on it, they were bouncing off the walls. They were running into it and bouncing off. And I'm thinking, hey, this is really something we didn't expect. We've got a new play surface here that other trampolines don't have. We've made a rubber room now. This is way better than I expected. It's not just the safety net. This is another play surface.

• 35:26Guy Raz?

  All right. So you've got the enclosed trampoline. You're ready to introduce this to the world. Two thousand four.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Go to the super show in Orlando, Florida. And they had a competition there, which was called the product of the year, basically. And if you got to a finalist or the top 10, you would be displayed in a specific area of the super show, independent of your booth. So we made all the applications necessary and we became a finalist.

• 35:55Guy Raz?

  This was the unveiling of Spring Free.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  This was it.

• 35:58Guy Raz?

  And how did you do? How many, did you get any orders?

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Well, we got one important order by Costco Canada.

• 36:05Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  They decided, okay, if we do it in Canada, there doesn't seem, it's not as litigious. They're all really nice people there. They don't seem to sue each other. Maybe we'll try it in Canada. And they put a test in for an essence that worked out that we put in a test for 400 pieces.

• 36:19Guy Raz?

  Let's try selling in Canada. So they put in order for 400 units?

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had about, the first order was 400 pieces on a trial.

• 36:25Guy Raz?

  By the, and by the way, where were you manufacturing them? In New Zealand?

• 36:28Speaker 00

  Well, these first 400 units, we made, I guess, 480 or 490, I think, something like that in New Zealand.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  With one container load.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  One container load.

• 36:37Guy Raz?

  In New Zealand. And what was the retail price for?

• 36:40Speaker 00

  Well, at that time, the retail price, we put it out to Canada was $9.99.

• 36:44Guy Raz?

  Wow. Just to, just to clarify something. This was, at that time, going to be one of the most expensive trampolines, right? So it was a big risk. And you had to make the case that this was worth the cost.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, our value proposition when we had that very first product at Orlando is the same as what it is today, which is that we provide the world's safest trampoline. We produce it out of the highest quality materials. We give the longest warranty. It's a 10-year warranty on everything. It's still that today. And so that was what we kept selling on the retailer side.

• 37:20Guy Raz?

  But you were selling them for about 999 bucks. That's a thin margin because it probably cost you...

• 37:26Speaker 00

  It was more than that. We were losing money on every product. We had to do that to find out if we could create a market.

• 37:32Guy Raz?

  All right, so they roll them out in Costcos in Canada, and how did they do?

• 37:37Speaker 00

  Moved very fast, very, very fast.

• 37:40Guy Raz?

  So did they put in a second order?

• 37:42Speaker 00

  Well, because we had put it on a test, and that was the spring of that year of '04, the next recurring order wasn't going to really take place until their next spring buy, which was '05. So then it was, oh crap, what do we do between now and then?

• 37:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because you gotta generate some revenue.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:01Guy Raz?

  And you're still making these in New Zealand, which is presumably expensive.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  We had transitioned right about then. We knew we couldn't continue. They were costing about $1,450.

• 38:12Guy Raz?

  To make one?

• 38:14Speaker 00

  To make one.

• 38:15Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  And so we knew we couldn't continue. And one of the things that had materialized at the super show in 2003, 2003, I said to you that I had people come up to me of various things. I had an individual come up to me with a business card who said, "I manufacture sporting goods in China. If you ever need a manufacturer, call me."

• 38:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  And when we reached the stage with Costco at the end of '04, we said... Okay, we gotta make the call.

• 38:42Guy Raz?

  Which I have to assume was gonna be an important move, right? Because it's gonna reduce your costs pretty significantly.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Well, here was the thing that was so critical to us is that Keith's IP was essential. We had to make sure we could get intellectual property protection.

• 38:56Guy Raz?

  Because in China, everything's copied. Not everything, but a lot of things are.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  It is, it is. You have to be careful, and we had to be careful. And the other thing is that the rods that Keith had done were really, they were all about technical know-how. So we weren't prepared to move that. So even to this day, most of the original manufacturing components, the rods and the net material that we use, we're using the exact same manufacturing partners. They've come a long way, the whole way through the whole journey. We've never deviated from that. But we moved all of the steel and 100% of the labor associated with producing and assembly into China.

• 39:36Guy Raz?

  All right, so 2000, you gotta wait till 2005 for this next big order. How many people were on your payroll at that point?

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Well, I think at that point, we, between our engineering group, our sales teams, we might have been 35.

• 39:51Guy Raz?

  And you're burning through cash?

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were burning cash. We were hanging on, you know, I was running my payables long. We were hanging on for that Costco delivery in spring '05.

• 40:02Guy Raz?

  So when Costco came back to you for their spring of '05, you know, purchase?

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Worked out to be about 3,265 pieces in '05.

• 40:10Guy Raz?

  3,265 pieces.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it felt good.

• 40:13Guy Raz?

  And, but you needed to finance that, right? Because they don't pay you first. They pay you like 90 days later.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  That's right. So we, I hit the street and found, found somebody who bought into a Costco PO.

• 40:26Guy Raz?

  So, oh, so this is somebody, and this is interesting. This is somebody who looks for people like you, who get a, get a purchase order from Costco, need financing to actually make the product, and they'll loan you the money at a high interest rate.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  At a high interest rate, yeah.

• 40:39Guy Raz?

  That was your lifeline?

• 40:41Speaker 00

  It was our lifeline, and it, and it, to be fairness to this day. It is the reason we survived and thrived.

• 40:48Guy Raz?

  Even though that order alone was not going to make you profitable.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  No, we weren't profitable.

• 40:52Guy Raz?

  You still had a long road to go.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  No, we weren't profitable. But, but it proved that we, because Costco represented a much bigger animal than just Canada. We went from Costco Canada to Costco UK, because UK was feared as being safe. And we got to go from Costco Canada to Costco Japan, which made no sense to us. We didn't really know what we were going to do in Japan. But we ended up selling 370 trampolines in Japan through Costco. And then we got to go on Costco.com, their e-commerce new platform for them, not in store, in 2007, I guess it was.

• 41:31Guy Raz?

  So Costco is, up until this point, up until 2007, your biggest contract?

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Virtually in the northern hemisphere and our only. We were selling direct in places where we could, but they were basically 90% of our distribution.

• 41:51Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you are now in this thing. 2008, they stopped. They stopped selling the trampoline?

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was probably the hardest point. So what happened is that as we got more and more and more successful with the product in Costco, some of the buyers, they were really proud. And so they would show off the product in a real flamboyant way, you know, having it in a prominent position.

• 42:17Guy Raz?

  Inside of Costco's.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  Inside of Costco's. And Mr. Senegal was, he opened every Costco.

• 42:23Guy Raz?

  The CEO.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, he came to every Costco opening. And there was a big opening in Halifax, Nova Scotia on May 13th. It was a Wednesday, '09. Never forget the date in my business career. And he had gone into the store. And at the time, he was still opposed to trampolines, even though we were being really successful. He was still uncomfortable with it. And, and so when he walked into the Halifax store, I get a phone call from the president at the time of Canada Costco, and they said,

• 42:54Speaker 00

  We're done. I said, what do you mean we're done? And they said, we're done. I said, no, no, no, I don't understand. We're not, how can we be done? And, and, and we skipped a part guy, which is in 2008, we decided to build our own factory in China because we weren't satisfied with the quality. So I invested about $5 million in building a Chinese factory. We did it because this was Costco. We were going to be in store. This was going to change the face of everything. And so we had been, we opened that factory in October of 2008. And all in preparation for our 2009 with Costco. And on the May 13th, we were told, we're done. And it was just because they had gone overboard in that store. They had made the trampoline one of the single biggest highlights in this grand opening

• 43:39Speaker 00

  in Halifax. And he was just pissed.

• 43:44Guy Raz?

  The CEO?

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:46Guy Raz?

  Because, because it was so present and visible, he walks in there and says, what is this trampoline doing in the center of my Costco?

• 43:53Speaker 00

  That's it. Those are the exact words. I don't think he really knew. I think we were below the radar. We were doing great numbers. We were doing great numbers for sporting goods. And so I was told, if you need to talk to Mr. Senegal, you got to call him on a Saturday morning in Seattle. I was given a telephone number to his direct dial to his desk.

• 44:11Guy Raz?

  And you called?

• 44:12Speaker 00

  And on the Saturday morning, shaking in my boots, I called. He was extremely polite. He shared his reasoning within reason. And he said, I've made my decision, Mr. Holmes, but I will honor any purchase orders that we have issued up until the end of this month. So any purchase orders that are issued up until the end of the month, we'll honor those purchase orders. And I hung up the phone and I went, oh crap. And my next call was to every Costco buyer I could find. Give me a P O, give me a P O, give me a P O.

• 44:45Guy Raz?

  Because you knew you had a month left.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  I had less than a month. I had, that was the, that was the 16th of May. It was a Saturday morning and I had 14 days and P Os took longer than that to get usually.

• 44:57Guy Raz?

  Wow. So what'd you do?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Well, it was a really good business skill learning session. I stepped back and I said, "Okay, we have a product that has unbelievable safety, quality and innovation characteristics. We have customers who love our product." I mean, our best marketing is our existing spring free customer. If a spring free customer has a spring free trampoline, if a parent who says, "Well, I really don't like trampolines," they'll sell it for me to other friends and neighbors. And 50% of our sales came from our customers. So we said, "Wherever spring frees are in backyards, we have to make it really easy." And our biggest market at the time, based on Costco delivery addresses, was California and Seattle.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  So we opened our own first spring free retail store on the off-ramp of the Costco headquarters.

• 45:48Guy Raz?

  In Seattle?

• 45:49Speaker 00

  In Seattle.

• 45:50Guy Raz?

  And this is in 2000?

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Well, this was in late 2009.

• 45:54Guy Raz?

  So there you had a showroom, people could try it, kids could jump on them.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. We called it, we called it the Spring Free Experience Center. And that store proved to be phenomenally successful. We were blowing the doors off the profits and we were just going, like, there was, I think there were very few retail stores that were doing the profit per square foot that we were doing out of that store.

• 46:19Guy Raz?

  So that store, I mean, they were just not flying off the shelves because it wasn't off the shelf, but that store started to just sell these things, like, I don't know.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Well, let me say this. We had a great dealer network we established as quick as we could in the US. They had trampolines on parade floats. They, they went to every fair, they went to every neighborhood. They connected with the communities because we knew where we had shipped. So we had, you know, we had these, whether it was a pop-up store or whether it was a permanent experience center, we went to consumers. We went out there, we did the shows, we had the stores and showed that there was a business model which was different than Costco.

• 46:56Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  And so we took a direct-to-consumer model. And we use Keith as the face of the organization. So he was the one who conveyed the story, the attributes, and the commitment to safety and quality.

• 47:10Guy Raz?

  So Keith, how did you, like, so all of a sudden, like, you've got to represent this product, right, to the world? You gotta do media interviews, you gotta do TV. Like, you are a self-described introvert. I can only imagine that was somewhat torturous for you to do.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, you're right, you're right. Steve did give me warning. He said, would you like to be the Dyson of Spring Free? I said, what on earth do you mean? Well, you know Dyson, Dyson vacuum cleaners? So I went and had a look, and there's Dyson doing his thing. I thought, I suppose I could do that. If I come across well, you know, maybe they can use it. Maybe it'll help with selling. So I said yes to Steve. So then he says, right, well, come to Toronto. We're gonna have a week, a week of filming. And I'm thinking, right, this is a big deal. This is not just one or two little afternoons. So it was one of the scariest weeks of my life, really.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  So I end up in Toronto in this big studio and find myself with three cameras there and lights, people all around, and microphones in front of me. And they say, right, well, just talk.

• 48:25Guy Raz?

  And you did?

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I talk. And then they say, oh, you come across really genuine. You know, you really come across well.

• 48:33Guy Raz?

  And how did it come out?

• 48:34Speaker 00

  Phenomenal.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  It was okay in the end.

• 48:38Guy Raz?

  So here's my question for you. I mean, it sounds like you were actually expanding pretty fast at this point.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were over 400 employees.

• 48:46Guy Raz?

  This is by 2000?

• 48:47Speaker 00

  By late 2010, yeah. I guess by then we were 400 employees.

• 48:50Guy Raz?

  How did you, what I'm trying to understand is, how did you expand to that number of employees when just two years before that Costco pulls out?

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Well, you know, sometimes you do stupid things. And what we did is, we decided to, we could've gone home when Costco pulled out, but we actually went deeper. So we increased our commitment in the factory in China. We increased our direct strategy. We increased our ability to open in direct retail stores.

• 49:17Guy Raz?

  Did you have to raise money?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Fortunately enough, we had, we had been reasonably.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Wise, we had been saving for those expansion opportunities in rainy days. So we needed to raise, we probably invested maybe five to seven million dollars in the factory construction and then a couple more million in some other stores. And I think we had a debt raise of about, at the time, three million dollars.

• 49:44Guy Raz?

  But I have to assume 2009, even maybe 2010 were tough years.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were very, very tough years. But we didn't stop investing. We kind of said like, you know, this is that risk. We kept thinking that that opportunity, the big, big opportunity was just ahead of us.

• 49:58Guy Raz?

  When did you start to see that light?

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd say 2010, 2011. 2011 to 2013 were phenomenal years for us globally. We had-

• 50:10Guy Raz?

  What happened? Why?

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Well, I give lots of credit to Keith. His design was always flawless. So that issue of safety that we kept talking about, we now had eight years of experience. So instead of saying we're the world's safest trampoline, but we've only sold 2,000, you know, we were actually saying, well, we've got, there's a couple hundred thousand trampolines out there and we actually have statistics now. And Keith started writing research papers and of measuring our statistics. And we were going, you know, we remove 90% of the product-related injuries. So he's taken, his design has removed 90%. And so we got that message out. Keith's videos and the way we distributed them, and we got traction and we got real traction.

• 50:53Guy Raz?

  How much, how much does a spring free trampoline cost today?

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Well, we have six different sizes, so it ranges anywhere from probably 1,600 to 2,400 dollars.

• 51:03Guy Raz?

  So this is a premium product. I mean, this is a very, this is an investment that you're going to make for a while.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, Keith always said that when he put a spring free into somebody's backyard, and I've agreed with him and we've continued, that it should be, that's it. They should pay the money. It should go in the backyard. There should be zero maintenance costs and there should be zero, you know, support costs. So in other words, if they got a problem, we back it. So we have a 10-year warranty on the whole product.

• 51:30Guy Raz?

  And how many are you selling on average of a year now?

• 51:34Speaker 00

  You know, we look at, you know, our probably 30,000 is our annual volume and we build our business model around that. We've had years that have gone much higher and we've had some years that have been a little lower based on some of the economics. I mean, we opened a factory in 2008. We lost Costco and there was a global financial crisis. I can tell you that wasn't the best year.

• 51:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  So, we had a tough, you know, we had a tough year. That might have been an 18,000-piece year.

• 51:58Guy Raz?

  I can only imagine those first four, five, six years, it was non-stop, just non-stop hustling, working, trying to get this out to market, calling people, getting rejected, people saying to you, "Wow, a trampoline? Who's this? What are you talking about? No, they're not safe." And is it, is it still like that today?

• 52:22Speaker 00

  You know, for some of our staff, there's no question. But it's fun. Like, I gotta tell you, you know, you want to be in a fun business, be in the trampoline business because there's never been a circumstance where, when the mom and dad have to see their kid on the trampoline for the first time after they've made a spring free purchase, that they don't go, "Wow, this is great." Most people don't know we exist, but when they see us, they go, "Ah, I get it."

• 52:48Guy Raz?

  Do you have a trampoline at the headquarters in Toronto?

• 52:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, every, every one of our offices has trampolines, absolutely. And we, you know, they're constantly being used in various forms.

• 52:59Guy Raz?

  Do you do like board meetings on your trampoline?

• 53:02Speaker 00

  We do, you can see some office meetings that'll occur on a trampoline.

• 53:06Guy Raz?

  Just everyone kind of, do people just synchronize or they're bouncing?

• 53:09Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 53:09Guy Raz?

  That doesn't happen?

• 53:10Speaker 00

  We're still a one-at-a-time trampoline company. So, yeah.

• 53:15Guy Raz?

  So, do you, do you consider yourself to be lucky that, you know, this business has managed to become, you know, sustainable? Or do you think it's because of your intelligence and hard work?

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know about the intelligence part, but I had due respect for the employees of our organization and for my wife and my kids who suffered through the early days. This has been about hard work. I was very fortunate to meet Dr. Keith Alexander, but being fortunate was about a lifelong friend that I got.

• 53:47Guy Raz?

  And Keith, what about you? Like, do you feel lucky that all this happened? Or, I mean, do you think it's just a product of your persistence and perseverance and grit?

• 53:57Speaker 02

  It's both of those. Of course, it's both of those. I do feel very lucky to have met someone like Steve, who's been prepared to be very persistent. One of the ways I like to think of it, for me, the invention process, it's my part of it, is that it's like having a child. The moment of conception is quite exciting. And then you carry it and you feed it for years. And eventually, it starts to meet people of its own. And then you get less control, less and less control. And who your child meets and where they go and how they grow up is not very much in your control at all. There's a lot of luck there. So in that sense, I've been very lucky as Steve's taken over the part to get it to the customers.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  So I was doing pretty well.

• 54:45Guy Raz?

  That's Keith Alexander, inventor of the Springfree trampoline, and Steve Holmes, the CEO of Springfree. Keith is still a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. And he also teaches product innovation. According to the company, Springfree has sold over 400,000 trampolines worldwide.

• 55:13Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for How You Built That. And today's story starts in the winter of 2015. Cindy Heilman had just moved to Toledo, Ohio. It's where her husband Chris grew up. And Cindy was having a hard time.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  Just feeling super, almost like depressed about the winter.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  For her, moving from Florida to Ohio is kind of a bit of a culture shock.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Yes, it's so gloomy.

• 55:38Guy Raz?

  Being from Florida, Cindy needed warmth and light. So she started buying lots and lots of candles, which meant lots of leftover candle containers.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  If they were in glass jars, I would hold on to them.

• 55:52Speaker 04

  Some of them were in a drawer, some of them were up in a cabinet. We'd buy candles and say, OK, this is in a really nice pot. We can use it to put our Q-tips in. We can use it for something around the house.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  But the ones that I would buy in ceramic containers, I would normally put a plant in it. And we have tons of house plants.

• 56:07Guy Raz?

  Now, this went on for two winters. Cold weather, candles, candle containers. And by March of 2017, there was one big change. Cindy had become a stay-at-home mom, which was great, except for the weather. So one day, a friend sent her a card to cheer her up.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  I was wondering why it had so many little bumps and dots on it.

• 56:28Guy Raz?

  Those bumps and dots were actually seeds. They were embedded in the paper. And instead of throwing the card away, Cindy could soak it in water, put it in a planter, and grow wildflowers.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  I just thought it was the coolest thing ever and almost felt lucky to have it.

• 56:46Guy Raz?

  Now, around the same time, Cindy found a bluish-gray planter pot, and she really wanted to use it.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  Oh, I could put some candle wax in this and just try and make a candle.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  She said, hey, I think we could sell these. And I kind of did the math in my head. I was like, that's going to have to be a $30 candle. Nobody's going to pay $30 for a candle. And Cindy turned around and looked at me, and she's like,

• 57:06Speaker 03

  You just bought me a $30 candle last week.

• 57:09Guy Raz?

  That's when they got another idea. They could make a candle in a planter pot and then use that paper with the seeds embedded in it for the label.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  People would be able to grow wildflowers after they're done with the container, so they don't have to throw it away.

• 57:23Guy Raz?

  So they got to work.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  We had no idea what we were doing. We were just watching a bunch of YouTube videos, different Pinterest ideas on DIY, how to make a candle.

• 57:34Guy Raz?

  It took two months of melting wax all over her basement, but Cindy figured it out. And then Chris said, OK, we think it's a good idea, but will it actually sell? So they went to a trade show to find out.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  I was really blown away by How emotionally invested people got into our product.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  A lot of the guys, they would have their girl with them and be like, this is a cool product, isn't it? Do you want one?

• 57:58Guy Raz?

  And that day, they sold every single one of their candles and covered all their expenses and made $1,000 profit.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  It was also a couple of days' worth of work.

• 58:07Guy Raz?

  And that was enough reason for Chris to consider quitting his banking job because Chris and Cindy had been thinking about starting a business together for years.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  So we were in a really good financial position to be able to take this type of step. So it really didn't feel very risky to us at all.

• 58:23Guy Raz?

  And so Chris left his job and joined Cindy in their basement. They took $4,000 out of their savings to buy wax, wicks, pots, and seed paper, and they made 850 candles. In over five months, at more than a dozen trade shows, they sold every single one of them.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  I mean, it's backbreaking work going to these trade shows every weekend because, number one, we don't have a weekend. We're working really long days. And then when we get back, it's, okay, we have to make a ton of candles so we can be ready for next week and the next event.

• 58:52Guy Raz?

  Over the past year, Chris and Cindy moved their business online. They got a $50,000 loan to scale up. They hired some employees and even moved their little candle-making factory out of their basement. But as married business partners, they're still struggling to find the right balance.

• 59:09Speaker 04

  Having the business out of our home for the past year has been a huge difference. We just pick, you know, two or three nights out of the week. Like, okay, these two or three nights after Adeline goes to bed, we're going to work on our business. And the other nights, it's just about us. We're not going to talk about business, and it's going to be all about family.

• 59:29Guy Raz?

  So far, founders Chris and Cindy Hallman have sold more than 12,000 growing candles. If you want to find out more about them or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, howibuiltthis.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org.

• 59:47Guy Raz?

  And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at [email protected]. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at howibuiltthis. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Julia Carney, J.C. Howard, Noor Kutsi, Neva Grant, Melissa Gray, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Candace Lim. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.