Abington inventor's product available just in time for Green Tuesday

On this first Tuesday after Thanksgiving, the nonprofit Green America wants holiday shoppers to devote their retail consumption to products that are planet friendly.

The new "Green Tuesday" initiative has big aspirations - to be as trend-inspiring as Black Friday and its online-shopping cousin, Cyber Monday.

Steven Costello would be content if it just meant a few orders for his Leaf Lugger.

The Abington Township resident is a lawyer by trade, specializing in medical-malpractice defense for the firm Post & Schell P.C. But when he is not trying to persuade juries to see things his way, the 54-year-old father of two is answering another calling: to invent.

Let's just say he's glad he's got law to fall back on. He is living proof that an inventor's life can be plagued with disappointment and frustration.

Sometimes, that is simply from not running with an idea fast enough. That is what happened with his golf pull cart, Costello said.

As a golfer with back problems, he was driven to find an easier way to wheel clubs around a course. More than 20 years ago, he said, he came up with a drawing of an "easy-to-use" device whose mobility was enabled by bicycle wheels. But because "the law business is so consuming" and Costello lacks building skills, that drawing never even made it to a prototype.

"A few years later, a company came out with pretty much precisely what my idea was," Costello recalled in an interview last week. "And it won product of the year at the Orlando Golf Show. That's sort of the biggest golf-merchandising show."

Ouch. Lesson learned:

"My thought was the next time I come up with an idea that I think is worthy, I'm going to follow through with it."

That idea would come about eight years later, while Costello was raking leaves and concluded there had to be a better cleanup aid than the ubiquitous tarp routinely used by homeowners to haul their leaf piles to the curb or surrounding woods.

His gripe with the tarp:

Its corners require constant straightening, it is unwieldy, and it is susceptible to wind. Costello got to thinking: "What if you put stiffeners in the outer panels of it and had a system where you could have a rope around the perimeter, would it work? In other words, if you pulled the rope, would it all of a sudden become a bag . . . and nothing would fall out when you went to take it to the woods or the curb?"

And when it was open and being dragged around the yard from one raked pile to the next, would it stay flat - as opposed to traditional tarps, whose corners often bunch up?

A prototype - made of nylon-reinforced vinyl, nylon mesh, and fiberglass stiffeners - yielded an affirmative answer to all those questions, Costello said.

What would follow was an agonizingly long five-year effort to secure a patent. Three of those years had to do with routine patent-waiting lists, Costello said. The rest had to do with patent officials' skepticism that Costello's proposal was no different from a fishing net.

A video ultimately helped convince them the Leaf Lugger was, indeed, unique. The patent was granted in September 2009, which, to Costello, only meant "the real work starts."

He headed to the National Hardware Show in Las Vegas in May 2010 to test Leaf Lugger's appeal.

"I had no idea whether people would laugh at this or whether they would think it was a viable, useful product," Costello said. He was relieved when it was "well-received."

Shan Madhavan was sold on it, too. His Barnett Canvas Goods & Bag Co. in Folcroft is making the Leaf Lugger, which retails for $49.99 to $64.99 through www.leaflugger.com and a few catalogs.

Still, it was a hairy retail start, Costello said, with orders coming in before a manufacturing deal had been cemented. In the end, the orders were filled but at a price, $39.99, that caused Costello to lose money on every order.

He and Madhavan recalibrated and came up with the current higher prices. So far, so good, with more than 1,500 Leaf Luggers sold.

Madhavan said the current price is "where it should be" for a product manufactured in the United States.

But the search continues for other materials that could bring that price down, Costello said.

With less than $100,000 personally invested in Leaf Lugger, Costello said his odds of success are "50/50," then went on to sound even more optimistic.

"I just have a feeling this thing might really go," he said, noting that Leaf Lugger was designated a "green" product at the National Hardware Show.

"Green Tuesday, hopefully, will become a staple of our business."