When her son was repeatedly coming home from middle school with black-ink stained fingers, Julia Rhodes, a former public school teacher and single mom, was inspired to do something about it.
"It was the black-finger disease of the '90s," said Rhodes. "Teachers, basketball coaches, students were using markers and whiteboards all the time, and their fingers as erasers."
She did some research and found that the market for markers was $1.8 billion, but no one had really developed marker-eraser products. Spotting an opportunity, Rhodes founded her company, KleenSlate Concepts, in 2001. She developed a prototype of a marker with an attachable eraser in her living room.
With no money for marketing, Rhodes went to trade shows and got creative. "I couldn't afford to rent a booth," she said. Instead, she made a white coat of wipeable material, wore it, and demonstrated on herself how the eraser worked.
Not the "classiest" tactic, she admitted, but it got buyers' attention. Her marker/eraser products are now sold at Office Depot and will soon be available in Staples.
Her success was a long time coming, said Rhodes. But every time she became frustrated, her biggest cheerleader was her son.
"I'm lucky he was so supportive," said Rhodes, who often visits schools to talk to kids about the fun of inventing. "He'd say, 'Mom, what's the worst that could happen? You go back to being a teacher. You can handle that.' "
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