Student vision heads for market

The student at the University of Nevada, Reno, had a vision a vision represented by a dirty old sock filled with a couple of tennis balls.

But his teacher had some experience making visions into reality, and a product inspired by that dirty old sock today is making its way into retail outlets across the country.

Shane Avansino, a junior business major at UNR, gets sore feet.

That's not surprising, given that he works his way through school as a courier for Western Title Co.

and fills his spare hours working toward fitness goals.

At the end of a long day, he massaged his feet with tennis balls inside a sock.

But Avansino also wants to become a product designer, and he was inspired when he heard his professor, Dr.

Peter Honebein, talk about the natural thermal therapy products that Honebein and his wife, Beth, market through their company, AuntieA's.

"One day before class, Shane showed me his product," Honebein said a few days ago.

"Shane's prototype was truly a dirty old sock with a couple of tennis balls in it.

He gave me his pitch, demonstrated how it's used and proposed that we figure a way to make it warm."

Honebein, who sees ideas ranging from vibrating tongue studs to heated wall-to-wall carpeting from his students each semester, didn't bite initially.

But the more he talked the idea over with his wife, the more they thought it might work for AuntieA's.

The nine-yearold company makes a product called the Bed & Body Warmer a grained-filled bag that's heated in a microwave oven to warm beds or soothe sore muscles.

The foot massager Avansino had developed with a friend, Jason Lindstrom, might be a logical extension of the Bed & Body Warmer design.

But the initial design couldn't be manufactured.

"We wanted the product to be completely natural no synthetics, no plastics, just cotton and grains," Avansino said.

"But we couldn't make it work."

Several prototypes later, the two students and the owners of AuntieA's hit upon a design that worked and dubbed it the Foossage body massager.

Avansino who said he's learned "There's absolutely no reward for inventing until you sell something" and Lindstrom signed over rights to the project in exchange for royalties.

The Honebeins located suppliers, trademarked the Foossage name and worked with attorney Andrew Gathy of the Sierra Patent Group in Stateline to file a patent for the project.

And that, Peter Honebein said, was the end of the easy part.

"As I explain to my students, coming up with a product idea is easy.

And fashioning the idea into a manufacturable product takes only time and money.

But the real challenge of marketing is building demand and figuring how to get the product into the hands of customers."

That's particularly tricky with Foossage, he said, because nothing else like it is on the market.

About the closest type of product are the wooden foot massagers found in specialty stores, and that gives Honebein an opening.

"Wherever someone sells a foot roller, there shall we be," he said.

The Honebeins have pitched the Foossage to the catalogs that carry the Bed & Body Warmer catalogs such as Plow & Hearth and Brookstone and 70 samples are being evaluated for inclusion in holiday catalogs.

Avansino is involved, meanwhile, with making sales calls on local retailers.

Reno retailers including Good Feet, King's Nutrition Center and Melting Pot have taken on the line, and Honebein has his fingers crossed that the product may be picked up in short order by a national retail chain or two.