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What do they have in common? – WD-40, the coyote vest, neoprene board shorts, banana hat
San Diego inventors' conquests
A coyote escaped with his beloved Buffy, but Paul Mott didn’t simply mourn his loss. The tragic event spurred him into action.
Most people don’t notice power lines unless there’s a problem with them. And as a kid, I was like most people — until my dad pointed up at the lines as we drove the backroads of suburban Philadelphia and said, “Hey look up there. You see dad’s spacers?” My grandfather, an engineer, was also an inventor. The spacers he invented kept power lines at a consistent distance from one another. They were constructed using a material called faience, similar to porcelain. (Even though the faience spacers would last longer, they were eventually phased out by less durable plastic spacers.) As inventions go, they weren’t that exciting. What was exciting was the inventing itself: an idea that became a creation that became a product that others felt was worth purchasing.
Many San Diegans probably don’t realize that WD-40 was invented here. The go-to remedy for silencing squeaky hinges, lubricating moving parts, preventing grimy tools from rusting, and oh yes, breaking down that awful adhesive residue left behind by retail price tags was invented for the Rocket Chemical Company (later the WD-40 Company) circa 1953. Its original purpose was to prevent the outer skin of early intercontinental ballistic Atlas Missiles from corroding. But by 1958, it was being sold to consumers in San Diego, and it became a commercial product in 1961. The company currently has a net worth of $3.4 billion — that’s a whole lot of silenced squeaks.
The following four local inventions may not take off the way WD-40 has, but they all serve a unique purpose and fill a specific void — an empty space in the world of products that their creators recognized and remedied.
The Genteel Trail Bell
Chris Lacy owned a company that marketed trade shows and the tech industry, but he knew that world was in decline. He wasn’t exactly racking his brain for an idea that would bring in some extra money, but he knew that he could probably use a second income at some point in the future. He lives near the beach in Encinitas with his wife, and they both surf often. But, as he explains it, “the surf is not always good.” So about 15 years ago, the couple took up mountain biking. “We ride all the trails all over San Diego and are super into it,” he says. “One day, we were out on the trail, and we were riding, and we came up behind some hikers. There are usually two ways you pass hikers. You either ring a traditional dinger bell, or you yell, ‘Passing on the left!’ Let’s just say that we rang the traditional dinger bell in this situation, and the people kind of got angry at us. They gave us a look. They didn’t say anything, but you could tell that they were annoyed that we came up and rang a bike bell right behind them to say, ‘Hey, we’re right here!’ When you do that, or when you yell ‘Passing on the left!’ there’s almost an implications that you are asking that hiker to step aside. Saying, ‘Hey, I’m moving fast on a bulky object that could injure you. Get out of my way.’ And it’s not that you’re saying that, but the other person on the trail — which might be a hiker, equestrian or another biker — they perceive it that way. So after that encounter, my wife and I were talking and saying, ‘Regular bike bells just don’t do it on a trail,” and yelling ‘Passing on the left!’ has almost the same effect. We were like, ‘If only there was a bell that was a little nicer. That didn’t sound aggressive. What would a bike bell like that be like?’”
They met some mountain bikers who were using cowbells or sleigh bells. These seemed less annoying to the hikers, but proved perhaps more annoying to the riders themselves, since they were always dinging. “At that point, we said, ‘What if there was a cowbell that you could turn on or off depending on the situation?’ We pretty much went home immediately and out to the garage and started trying to hack the concept. It turned out to be a little harder than we thought. The first year, we just hacked around. I would order parts — just simple dinger bells on Amazon or cowbells — and then I would go in my garage with pliers, hacksaws, blow-torches, wire, cables and everything else, just trying to come up with a mechanism for how to get this thing to turn on and off.”
After a year of garage experimentation, they had a good idea of how they wanted the bell to work, but it was still a far cry from a finished design; something sleek, functional, and reasonably inexpensive to manufacture. In 2013, they hired an engineer to help refine their ideas. Lacy estimates that they went through 30 to 40 versions of the bell before they arrived at the final product. The bell would eventually be constructed of “reasonably thick” solid brass. “The reason we wanted it that way is basically that the larger the bell and the thicker the brass, the richer the sound,” Lacy says. “We felt like since it was something that people were going to be listening to a lot, and also that it was something you really wanted to use to communicate in a very pleasant and positive way to other trail users, that the sound really needed to be good.”
Chris Lacy says “The first year, we just hacked around. I would order parts — just simple dinger bells on Amazon or cowbells — and then I would go in my garage with pliers, hacksaws, blow-torches, wire, cables and everything else, just trying to come up with a mechanism for how to get this thing to turn on and off.”
In 2014, the first Timber Mountain Bike Bells went on sale to the public. They were the first bike bells that could either ring continuously or be switched on and off. Sales grew organically. “The great thing is that the product makes itself known,” Lacy says. “It’s not a quiet product that sits there in the corner, which people forget about. People are out on the trail, and they hear somebody with our product and say, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ They answer, ‘Oh, it’s this cool bell I got and here’s how it works.’ Honestly, that is probably where most of our growth has come from. Just from people talking about it on the trail.”
Since 2016, Timber Mountain Bike Bells have generated enough sales to support Chris and his wife. “I think when we started this, I think we thought the end game was selling,” Lacy explains. “The truth is, we kind of like doing it. It makes us happy. We’re reaching the age when people do retire, but if you have a gig that allows you to do what you like to do, go surf in the morning and take vacations and spend time with family and friends, and yet have a vocation that you enjoy — it’s not too bad. We’re in a happy place running the company.”
Helping Hats
Sean Adler grew up in Del Mar and graduated from Torrey Pines High School. Afterwards, he attended the University of Colorado and graduated with a degree in corporate finance. When he moved back to San Diego, he landed a job as a money manager, but the gig didn’t entirely satisfy him. “Numbers and math are great,” he says, “but I have an artistic side, too.” Adler began logging random ideas when they came to him “at the weirdest times of day or night.”
“I had this idea in 2016 when I was a single guy,” he explains. “Maybe I didn’t have a lot of things on my plate at that time. I knew that the tape on the bananas wasn’t meant to preserve them, and most people don’t realize that. I was trying to figure out ways to make them last longer. I tried duct tape and tin foil, and Saran Wrap, and all those methods just don’t look good on the kitchen counter, and they are also bad for the environment. So when the pandemic happened, and I was stuck working from home, that was really my chance to launch one of the businesses and ideas that I had.”
The idea eventually became Nana Hats. Beneath the hat’s cute, crocheted exterior, usually in the shape of some critter or other, lies the product’s secret weapon — a silicone cap which extends the counter life of your bananas. Adler claims that he has seen a bunch last for two weeks when Nana Hats are placed on the stems right way. This is because the Nana Hats act as a barrier to contain the ethylene gas (a plant hormone that can cause fruits to ripen) that bananas naturally release. That release ramps up significantly as bananas ripen — which explains how pristine, yellow fruit can quickly transform into brown, gooey globs in such a short span of time.
Timber Mountain Bike Bells were the first bike bells that could either ring continuously or be switched on and off.
Picking the correct silicone proved to be a tricky task. “We wanted to use something that was stretchy,” he explains. “So, we tried different materials. With silicone, there are all different types of hardnesses for how stiff or stretchy you want it to be. There were so many different materials that we played with, because if it’s too stretchy, they can’t get the silicone out of the cavity. It gets stuck in there. If it’s too hard, then it will just rip when someone tries to stretch it. There was so much tinkering with the design and the material. We chose a BPA-free, surgical-grade silicone. That’s silicone you would see in hospitals.”
What Adler initially assumed would be a weekend project turned into a ten-month endeavor with tooling done overseas and injection molding. “We had people knitting and crocheting and machine-woven designs and lawyers and patents and trademarks…it’s just insane. I was all-in when I filed the patent because that’s a big commitment financially, and I knew I had to see it through,” he says. He eventually dropped six-figures into his self-funded adventure for something that looked “so simple and easy to do.”
Once they were manufactured, Adler experienced rapid success on social media. “When you are scrolling on Instagram you are going to stop scrolling when you see a picture of a hat on a banana,” he says. “I don’t care who you are. It’s the best scroll-stopping material.” He had some early success landing Nana Hats in some grocery stores and mom and pop retail gift shops, and then Nana Hats got mentioned in a kitchen gadgets segment on Today With Hoda & Jenna. “I had no forewarning, and I was totally caught off-guard,” he explains. “I didn’t know what was happening. You see all these sales coming in to your website and you are like, ‘What’s going on? There’s something happening right now, but I don’t know what’s happening.’” Adler’s grandmother called him from the East Coast to inform him that she had just seen his product on the Today Show. She was likely watching as well when Adler appeared on Shark Tank in November of 2022, and she watched her grandson strike a deal with Lori Greiner and Peter Jones.
Adler recently struck a deal with Kroger that will land Nana Hats in four northwest states inside Fred Meyer grocery stores. If they do well there, they could eventually make it to local Kroger stores such as Ralphs and Food 4 Less. “They just got delivered to their distribution center in Washington two days ago,” he says. “It will be a little while until they make their way to San Diego stores. But I am optimistic and confident it will do well. They are gonna be hanging off the banana racks. It’s actually hard to get it into the stores. It’s interesting. I never thought it would be this difficult, but it is a trailblazing product.”
Coyote Confounder
“I’ve always enjoyed working with things and inventing things and making things,” Paul Mott explains. “I was a mechanic as a young man, and then when I finally decided I didn’t want to be a mechanic, I went to college. I got a master’s degree in computer science, so I had a nice job here in San Diego doing software development. I did that for many years, and then I went off and started a motorcycle company with a buddy of mine. We did that for a few years, but it all fell apart in 2009 with the economy crashing.”
Mott returned to the world of software engineering. Fast-forward to 2014: after working at home all day, he would often take his three small dogs out for a walk. Sometimes, these strolls would be at his local dog park in Scripps Ranch. It seemed like a safe place to walk his loyal pets off-leash — until one September evening, shortly before sunset, when a coyote brazenly snatched up one his dogs. “The dog was actually behind me, and I heard a little yelp, and I turned around and saw her in the jaws of this coyote,” he explains. “At that point, the damage was already done before I even realized it was happening. He carried her away.
Sean Adler recently struck a deal with Kroger that will land Nana Hats in four northwest states inside Fred Meyer grocery stores. If they do well there, they could eventually make it to local Kroger stores such as Ralphs and Food 4 Less.
“I’m a pretty good runner, but he carried her up into an SDG&E pipe storage yard. I don’t know if you can imagine being in a video game where there are these pipes that are 50 feet long and stacked up as tall as you, and you are running through this hallway and you can just kind of see down the lengths of where these pipes are stacked. It’s like a maze.” The coyote escaped with his beloved Buffy, but Mott didn’t simply mourn his loss. The tragic event spurred him into action.
“At some point, I realized that if I am ever going to have any peace of mind ever again, we’ve gotta have some kind of a solution to this problem,” he says. “So, I started analyzing everything I had witnessed the coyote do. I realized that like any other complicated system, all you have to do is break one part of it and it all falls apart — introduce a point of failure. So I just started thinking, ‘What could I have done? If there was anything that could have existed to make this coyote let go of my dog, what would it be?’”
His original thought: protect the dog by utilizing a sudden burst of electricity, in the same manner that an electric dog collar would work. To harness the electricity to the dog, Mott devised a stab-resistant vest made of Kevlar. “These ideas just started popping into my head,” he says. “Then I thought, ‘Let’s put spikes on it and make it cover the whole body. Let’s cover everything.’” Paul worked with his wife Pamela on designs for the vest, and eventually they started strapping early versions onto their dogs to wear during their walks.
“Sure enough, other people saw it and they started going, ‘Well, that’s pretty cool. Can you make one for us?’” Mott says. “We started thinking that maybe other people would want to do this, so we would start a little shop on Etsy and just make a few and sell them here at the house.” Those days in 2016 and 2017 were the start of what would become known as the CoyoteVest, and the company has morphed from a makeshift operation run out of a garage to a business with locations in Scripps Ranch, Oceanside, and Orange County. Along the way, CoyoteVest also popped up on Shark Tank in 2019. In this case, no deal was struck but Mott mentions that they still see sales bumps whenever reruns of the episode air. An even larger boost came from a viral video of a man defending his small dog from a coyote. The encounter ended with the owner picking up the coyote by his tail and tossing the animal into a dumpster. At the very end of the clip, he showcases his small dog — now outfitted in a brand new CoyoteVest.
What makes Greg Orfe and Wes Horbatuck’s Driftline “Driftie” boardshorts unique is that they incorporate a 0.5mm neoprene inner lining which is connected to an outer shell that resembles a traditional board short.
One interesting sidenote: the original concept of the vest delivering an electric shock was eventually abandoned entirely, thanks to a conversation Mott had with a biologist who studied coyotes and their interactions with skunks. He informed Mott that the look of the skunks — specifically, the contrast of their colors and lines — were their primary defense. Mott recalls the biologist telling him, “‘You know what? This is probably freaking out the coyotes just because of the look of it.’ I think there’s a lot of biological stuff going on with this vest in the way that a coyote perceives it when they encounter it on potential prey,” Mott concludes. “It’s like playing a card game with the coyotes — telling them it’s a losing hand, don’t even try.”
The Waterman’s shifting season shorts
Greg Orfe and Wes Horbatuck met when they were undergrads at Elon University in North Carolina. The two were roommates through all four years of college, then went their separate ways, with Orfe landing in D.C. and Horbatuck moving to New York. But both ended up moving to San Diego at the end of 2015. Orfe would begin to pursue a career in graphic design, while Horbatuck seemed like a natural entrepreneur. “It was the start of the remote movement,” Orfe says, “so we were living the California dream. We had our desks in our garage and a ping-pong table. We were just having a good time.” The two fully embraced the San Diego lifestyle and found themselves “in the water, surfing every day.”
“One day on the beach, we literally had that lightbulb moment of, ‘I wish there was something that was in-between a whole wetsuit and a boardshort,’” Orfe explains. “This was because it was too cold for boardshorts, and just too warm for that wetsuit. We kind of ran with that idea, and I needed a project for design school to just brand a business from the ground up. I took that idea to class and by the end of the semester, we had a whole business pretty much mapped out. I had a logo designed, business cards…everything. Even though that wasn’t the business itself, it made us feel confident that this was something that could take on a life and have some legs to it. Then we ended up meeting the right people and connecting with industry folk in the surf and apparel industries. It transpired from there.”
What makes Orfe and Horbatuck’s Driftline “Driftie” boardshorts unique is that they incorporate a 0.5mm neoprene inner lining which is connected to an outer shell that resembles a traditional board short. Horbatuck guesses that most San Diegans who enjoy water sports would use these when the water temperature ranges from 69-75 degrees. “From a Driftline standpoint, we have athletes that are in Florida in the summertime wearing our product and that water is in the 80s,” he says. “The reason is because it fills that chafing gap more than just being something that can keep you warm. We also have people who during the summer on Michigan lakes don’t want to wear a wetsuit and can handle the cold very differently than those in Florida. So, they will wear our trunks in low-60s water, because to them that is considered warm. So, ‘ideal’ is a huge range, depending on your location.”
CoyoteVest has morphed from a makeshift operation run out of a garage to a business with locations in Scripps Ranch, Oceanside and Orange County.
And there are plenty of different locations out there. “We have now sold at least one product in every state,” Horbatuck says. “So, someone in Alaska is rocking Drifties is some water sport.” The key may have been shifting Drifties from a core-surfer item to a product aimed at waterfolk of all types. “Surfing is definitely big for us, but I do know as a San Diego guy that core surfing can be intimidating for people,” he explains. “You realize that the majority of people who surf aren’t that core, incredible surfer. It’s the everyday person who just wants to get a little bit better at their water sport and enjoy their life on the water. I think what happened is that once we realized that, and then also, at the same time, during Covid watersports got really popular. We started to open our eyes to be like, ‘We are bigger than just surf.’” They mention an email from a customer that detailed a genius repurposing for the Drifties — a bathing suit that can keep a colostomy bag in place during a day at the beach. “He was able to wear shorts in the water at the beach without causing too much of a stir,” Horbatuck says. “He was really appreciative of that.”
All of the previous inventors in this story mentioned issues with others attempting to rip off their products. An interesting aspect of Drifties is that the manufacturing and design processes were so complex and demanding, that they are not too worried about someone cloning them. “From an actual, physical making of the product standpoint we have a utility patent, and it’s a really solid patent in the United States,” Horbatuck says. “So, we’re covered from a lot of standpoints. We are actively working to maintain that and extend it. We also went through sixteen manufacturers. You need a special kind of needle to work with this. Also, neoprene is not a cheap or easy material to get. You have to go over all those hurdles to even create one sample, and a lot of rip-off companies really just want to make cheap stuff that is easy to manufacture. If you want to create something that is true neoprene and very similar to our shorts, it’s not easy to rip off at all.”
Here's something you might be interested in.
What do they have in common? – WD-40, the coyote vest, neoprene board shorts, banana hat
San Diego inventors' conquests
What do they have in common? – WD-40, the coyote vest, neoprene board shorts, banana hat
San Diego inventors' conquests
A coyote escaped with his beloved Buffy, but Paul Mott didn’t simply mourn his loss. The tragic event spurred him into action.
Most people don’t notice power lines unless there’s a problem with them. And as a kid, I was like most people — until my dad pointed up at the lines as we drove the backroads of suburban Philadelphia and said, “Hey look up there. You see dad’s spacers?” My grandfather, an engineer, was also an inventor. The spacers he invented kept power lines at a consistent distance from one another. They were constructed using a material called faience, similar to porcelain. (Even though the faience spacers would last longer, they were eventually phased out by less durable plastic spacers.) As inventions go, they weren’t that exciting. What was exciting was the inventing itself: an idea that became a creation that became a product that others felt was worth purchasing.
Many San Diegans probably don’t realize that WD-40 was invented here. The go-to remedy for silencing squeaky hinges, lubricating moving parts, preventing grimy tools from rusting, and oh yes, breaking down that awful adhesive residue left behind by retail price tags was invented for the Rocket Chemical Company (later the WD-40 Company) circa 1953. Its original purpose was to prevent the outer skin of early intercontinental ballistic Atlas Missiles from corroding. But by 1958, it was being sold to consumers in San Diego, and it became a commercial product in 1961. The company currently has a net worth of $3.4 billion — that’s a whole lot of silenced squeaks.
The following four local inventions may not take off the way WD-40 has, but they all serve a unique purpose and fill a specific void — an empty space in the world of products that their creators recognized and remedied.
The Genteel Trail Bell
Chris Lacy owned a company that marketed trade shows and the tech industry, but he knew that world was in decline. He wasn’t exactly racking his brain for an idea that would bring in some extra money, but he knew that he could probably use a second income at some point in the future. He lives near the beach in Encinitas with his wife, and they both surf often. But, as he explains it, “the surf is not always good.” So about 15 years ago, the couple took up mountain biking. “We ride all the trails all over San Diego and are super into it,” he says. “One day, we were out on the trail, and we were riding, and we came up behind some hikers. There are usually two ways you pass hikers. You either ring a traditional dinger bell, or you yell, ‘Passing on the left!’ Let’s just say that we rang the traditional dinger bell in this situation, and the people kind of got angry at us. They gave us a look. They didn’t say anything, but you could tell that they were annoyed that we came up and rang a bike bell right behind them to say, ‘Hey, we’re right here!’ When you do that, or when you yell ‘Passing on the left!’ there’s almost an implications that you are asking that hiker to step aside. Saying, ‘Hey, I’m moving fast on a bulky object that could injure you. Get out of my way.’ And it’s not that you’re saying that, but the other person on the trail — which might be a hiker, equestrian or another biker — they perceive it that way. So after that encounter, my wife and I were talking and saying, ‘Regular bike bells just don’t do it on a trail,” and yelling ‘Passing on the left!’ has almost the same effect. We were like, ‘If only there was a bell that was a little nicer. That didn’t sound aggressive. What would a bike bell like that be like?’”
They met some mountain bikers who were using cowbells or sleigh bells. These seemed less annoying to the hikers, but proved perhaps more annoying to the riders themselves, since they were always dinging. “At that point, we said, ‘What if there was a cowbell that you could turn on or off depending on the situation?’ We pretty much went home immediately and out to the garage and started trying to hack the concept. It turned out to be a little harder than we thought. The first year, we just hacked around. I would order parts — just simple dinger bells on Amazon or cowbells — and then I would go in my garage with pliers, hacksaws, blow-torches, wire, cables and everything else, just trying to come up with a mechanism for how to get this thing to turn on and off.”
After a year of garage experimentation, they had a good idea of how they wanted the bell to work, but it was still a far cry from a finished design; something sleek, functional, and reasonably inexpensive to manufacture. In 2013, they hired an engineer to help refine their ideas. Lacy estimates that they went through 30 to 40 versions of the bell before they arrived at the final product. The bell would eventually be constructed of “reasonably thick” solid brass. “The reason we wanted it that way is basically that the larger the bell and the thicker the brass, the richer the sound,” Lacy says. “We felt like since it was something that people were going to be listening to a lot, and also that it was something you really wanted to use to communicate in a very pleasant and positive way to other trail users, that the sound really needed to be good.”
Chris Lacy says “The first year, we just hacked around. I would order parts — just simple dinger bells on Amazon or cowbells — and then I would go in my garage with pliers, hacksaws, blow-torches, wire, cables and everything else, just trying to come up with a mechanism for how to get this thing to turn on and off.”
In 2014, the first Timber Mountain Bike Bells went on sale to the public. They were the first bike bells that could either ring continuously or be switched on and off. Sales grew organically. “The great thing is that the product makes itself known,” Lacy says. “It’s not a quiet product that sits there in the corner, which people forget about. People are out on the trail, and they hear somebody with our product and say, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ They answer, ‘Oh, it’s this cool bell I got and here’s how it works.’ Honestly, that is probably where most of our growth has come from. Just from people talking about it on the trail.”
Since 2016, Timber Mountain Bike Bells have generated enough sales to support Chris and his wife. “I think when we started this, I think we thought the end game was selling,” Lacy explains. “The truth is, we kind of like doing it. It makes us happy. We’re reaching the age when people do retire, but if you have a gig that allows you to do what you like to do, go surf in the morning and take vacations and spend time with family and friends, and yet have a vocation that you enjoy — it’s not too bad. We’re in a happy place running the company.”
Helping Hats
Sean Adler grew up in Del Mar and graduated from Torrey Pines High School. Afterwards, he attended the University of Colorado and graduated with a degree in corporate finance. When he moved back to San Diego, he landed a job as a money manager, but the gig didn’t entirely satisfy him. “Numbers and math are great,” he says, “but I have an artistic side, too.” Adler began logging random ideas when they came to him “at the weirdest times of day or night.”
“I had this idea in 2016 when I was a single guy,” he explains. “Maybe I didn’t have a lot of things on my plate at that time. I knew that the tape on the bananas wasn’t meant to preserve them, and most people don’t realize that. I was trying to figure out ways to make them last longer. I tried duct tape and tin foil, and Saran Wrap, and all those methods just don’t look good on the kitchen counter, and they are also bad for the environment. So when the pandemic happened, and I was stuck working from home, that was really my chance to launch one of the businesses and ideas that I had.”
The idea eventually became Nana Hats. Beneath the hat’s cute, crocheted exterior, usually in the shape of some critter or other, lies the product’s secret weapon — a silicone cap which extends the counter life of your bananas. Adler claims that he has seen a bunch last for two weeks when Nana Hats are placed on the stems right way. This is because the Nana Hats act as a barrier to contain the ethylene gas (a plant hormone that can cause fruits to ripen) that bananas naturally release. That release ramps up significantly as bananas ripen — which explains how pristine, yellow fruit can quickly transform into brown, gooey globs in such a short span of time.
Timber Mountain Bike Bells were the first bike bells that could either ring continuously or be switched on and off.
Picking the correct silicone proved to be a tricky task. “We wanted to use something that was stretchy,” he explains. “So, we tried different materials. With silicone, there are all different types of hardnesses for how stiff or stretchy you want it to be. There were so many different materials that we played with, because if it’s too stretchy, they can’t get the silicone out of the cavity. It gets stuck in there. If it’s too hard, then it will just rip when someone tries to stretch it. There was so much tinkering with the design and the material. We chose a BPA-free, surgical-grade silicone. That’s silicone you would see in hospitals.”
What Adler initially assumed would be a weekend project turned into a ten-month endeavor with tooling done overseas and injection molding. “We had people knitting and crocheting and machine-woven designs and lawyers and patents and trademarks…it’s just insane. I was all-in when I filed the patent because that’s a big commitment financially, and I knew I had to see it through,” he says. He eventually dropped six-figures into his self-funded adventure for something that looked “so simple and easy to do.”
Once they were manufactured, Adler experienced rapid success on social media. “When you are scrolling on Instagram you are going to stop scrolling when you see a picture of a hat on a banana,” he says. “I don’t care who you are. It’s the best scroll-stopping material.” He had some early success landing Nana Hats in some grocery stores and mom and pop retail gift shops, and then Nana Hats got mentioned in a kitchen gadgets segment on Today With Hoda & Jenna. “I had no forewarning, and I was totally caught off-guard,” he explains. “I didn’t know what was happening. You see all these sales coming in to your website and you are like, ‘What’s going on? There’s something happening right now, but I don’t know what’s happening.’” Adler’s grandmother called him from the East Coast to inform him that she had just seen his product on the Today Show. She was likely watching as well when Adler appeared on Shark Tank in November of 2022, and she watched her grandson strike a deal with Lori Greiner and Peter Jones.
Adler recently struck a deal with Kroger that will land Nana Hats in four northwest states inside Fred Meyer grocery stores. If they do well there, they could eventually make it to local Kroger stores such as Ralphs and Food 4 Less. “They just got delivered to their distribution center in Washington two days ago,” he says. “It will be a little while until they make their way to San Diego stores. But I am optimistic and confident it will do well. They are gonna be hanging off the banana racks. It’s actually hard to get it into the stores. It’s interesting. I never thought it would be this difficult, but it is a trailblazing product.”
Coyote Confounder
“I’ve always enjoyed working with things and inventing things and making things,” Paul Mott explains. “I was a mechanic as a young man, and then when I finally decided I didn’t want to be a mechanic, I went to college. I got a master’s degree in computer science, so I had a nice job here in San Diego doing software development. I did that for many years, and then I went off and started a motorcycle company with a buddy of mine. We did that for a few years, but it all fell apart in 2009 with the economy crashing.”
Mott returned to the world of software engineering. Fast-forward to 2014: after working at home all day, he would often take his three small dogs out for a walk. Sometimes, these strolls would be at his local dog park in Scripps Ranch. It seemed like a safe place to walk his loyal pets off-leash — until one September evening, shortly before sunset, when a coyote brazenly snatched up one his dogs. “The dog was actually behind me, and I heard a little yelp, and I turned around and saw her in the jaws of this coyote,” he explains. “At that point, the damage was already done before I even realized it was happening. He carried her away.
Sean Adler recently struck a deal with Kroger that will land Nana Hats in four northwest states inside Fred Meyer grocery stores. If they do well there, they could eventually make it to local Kroger stores such as Ralphs and Food 4 Less.
“I’m a pretty good runner, but he carried her up into an SDG&E pipe storage yard. I don’t know if you can imagine being in a video game where there are these pipes that are 50 feet long and stacked up as tall as you, and you are running through this hallway and you can just kind of see down the lengths of where these pipes are stacked. It’s like a maze.” The coyote escaped with his beloved Buffy, but Mott didn’t simply mourn his loss. The tragic event spurred him into action.
“At some point, I realized that if I am ever going to have any peace of mind ever again, we’ve gotta have some kind of a solution to this problem,” he says. “So, I started analyzing everything I had witnessed the coyote do. I realized that like any other complicated system, all you have to do is break one part of it and it all falls apart — introduce a point of failure. So I just started thinking, ‘What could I have done? If there was anything that could have existed to make this coyote let go of my dog, what would it be?’”
His original thought: protect the dog by utilizing a sudden burst of electricity, in the same manner that an electric dog collar would work. To harness the electricity to the dog, Mott devised a stab-resistant vest made of Kevlar. “These ideas just started popping into my head,” he says. “Then I thought, ‘Let’s put spikes on it and make it cover the whole body. Let’s cover everything.’” Paul worked with his wife Pamela on designs for the vest, and eventually they started strapping early versions onto their dogs to wear during their walks.
“Sure enough, other people saw it and they started going, ‘Well, that’s pretty cool. Can you make one for us?’” Mott says. “We started thinking that maybe other people would want to do this, so we would start a little shop on Etsy and just make a few and sell them here at the house.” Those days in 2016 and 2017 were the start of what would become known as the CoyoteVest, and the company has morphed from a makeshift operation run out of a garage to a business with locations in Scripps Ranch, Oceanside, and Orange County. Along the way, CoyoteVest also popped up on Shark Tank in 2019. In this case, no deal was struck but Mott mentions that they still see sales bumps whenever reruns of the episode air. An even larger boost came from a viral video of a man defending his small dog from a coyote. The encounter ended with the owner picking up the coyote by his tail and tossing the animal into a dumpster. At the very end of the clip, he showcases his small dog — now outfitted in a brand new CoyoteVest.
What makes Greg Orfe and Wes Horbatuck’s Driftline “Driftie” boardshorts unique is that they incorporate a 0.5mm neoprene inner lining which is connected to an outer shell that resembles a traditional board short.
One interesting sidenote: the original concept of the vest delivering an electric shock was eventually abandoned entirely, thanks to a conversation Mott had with a biologist who studied coyotes and their interactions with skunks. He informed Mott that the look of the skunks — specifically, the contrast of their colors and lines — were their primary defense. Mott recalls the biologist telling him, “‘You know what? This is probably freaking out the coyotes just because of the look of it.’ I think there’s a lot of biological stuff going on with this vest in the way that a coyote perceives it when they encounter it on potential prey,” Mott concludes. “It’s like playing a card game with the coyotes — telling them it’s a losing hand, don’t even try.”
The Waterman’s shifting season shorts
Greg Orfe and Wes Horbatuck met when they were undergrads at Elon University in North Carolina. The two were roommates through all four years of college, then went their separate ways, with Orfe landing in D.C. and Horbatuck moving to New York. But both ended up moving to San Diego at the end of 2015. Orfe would begin to pursue a career in graphic design, while Horbatuck seemed like a natural entrepreneur. “It was the start of the remote movement,” Orfe says, “so we were living the California dream. We had our desks in our garage and a ping-pong table. We were just having a good time.” The two fully embraced the San Diego lifestyle and found themselves “in the water, surfing every day.”
“One day on the beach, we literally had that lightbulb moment of, ‘I wish there was something that was in-between a whole wetsuit and a boardshort,’” Orfe explains. “This was because it was too cold for boardshorts, and just too warm for that wetsuit. We kind of ran with that idea, and I needed a project for design school to just brand a business from the ground up. I took that idea to class and by the end of the semester, we had a whole business pretty much mapped out. I had a logo designed, business cards…everything. Even though that wasn’t the business itself, it made us feel confident that this was something that could take on a life and have some legs to it. Then we ended up meeting the right people and connecting with industry folk in the surf and apparel industries. It transpired from there.”
What makes Orfe and Horbatuck’s Driftline “Driftie” boardshorts unique is that they incorporate a 0.5mm neoprene inner lining which is connected to an outer shell that resembles a traditional board short. Horbatuck guesses that most San Diegans who enjoy water sports would use these when the water temperature ranges from 69-75 degrees. “From a Driftline standpoint, we have athletes that are in Florida in the summertime wearing our product and that water is in the 80s,” he says. “The reason is because it fills that chafing gap more than just being something that can keep you warm. We also have people who during the summer on Michigan lakes don’t want to wear a wetsuit and can handle the cold very differently than those in Florida. So, they will wear our trunks in low-60s water, because to them that is considered warm. So, ‘ideal’ is a huge range, depending on your location.”
CoyoteVest has morphed from a makeshift operation run out of a garage to a business with locations in Scripps Ranch, Oceanside and Orange County.
And there are plenty of different locations out there. “We have now sold at least one product in every state,” Horbatuck says. “So, someone in Alaska is rocking Drifties is some water sport.” The key may have been shifting Drifties from a core-surfer item to a product aimed at waterfolk of all types. “Surfing is definitely big for us, but I do know as a San Diego guy that core surfing can be intimidating for people,” he explains. “You realize that the majority of people who surf aren’t that core, incredible surfer. It’s the everyday person who just wants to get a little bit better at their water sport and enjoy their life on the water. I think what happened is that once we realized that, and then also, at the same time, during Covid watersports got really popular. We started to open our eyes to be like, ‘We are bigger than just surf.’” They mention an email from a customer that detailed a genius repurposing for the Drifties — a bathing suit that can keep a colostomy bag in place during a day at the beach. “He was able to wear shorts in the water at the beach without causing too much of a stir,” Horbatuck says. “He was really appreciative of that.”
All of the previous inventors in this story mentioned issues with others attempting to rip off their products. An interesting aspect of Drifties is that the manufacturing and design processes were so complex and demanding, that they are not too worried about someone cloning them. “From an actual, physical making of the product standpoint we have a utility patent, and it’s a really solid patent in the United States,” Horbatuck says. “So, we’re covered from a lot of standpoints. We are actively working to maintain that and extend it. We also went through sixteen manufacturers. You need a special kind of needle to work with this. Also, neoprene is not a cheap or easy material to get. You have to go over all those hurdles to even create one sample, and a lot of rip-off companies really just want to make cheap stuff that is easy to manufacture. If you want to create something that is true neoprene and very similar to our shorts, it’s not easy to rip off at all.”
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