Sept. 30 is a date Gary Youngstrom and Dorothy Leaf will never forget.
That is when the Winlock residents received their first of three patents for the wood captains beds the couple has been designing and building for decades.
According to their patent attorney, David Lowe of Seattle, their achievement is a rarity, Gary said.
Lowe has 18 attorneys under him, Gary said, “and he told me that they can’t even think of anybody in their 60s who has a patent pending.”
Gary and Dorothy, who are not married, have been together for 37 years. They met in Kennewick, Wash., in 1977, where Gary, a native of Woodland, owned a water bed store and Dorothy, a 1951 graduate of Kelso High School, was a secretary for a meat distributor.
“The first thing I said to her was, ‘My name is Gary, and I’m the water bed king,’ ” Gary said, chuckling.
They soon became a couple and Dorothy started helping Gary build bedroom furniture.
“She was a secretary and had her nails done and all this fancy stuff,” Gary said. “She’d come down in the afternoons and put on some junk (protective clothing) and she’d help me stain.”
They built and delivered about 12 water beds a day and employed five people.
After a few years, they entered into a partnership with a large water bed dealer in Tacoma. A year into the new enterprise, Gary discovered he didn’t enjoy the bigger business collaboration.
“I realized that I liked working with three or four people,” he said. “I liked being the builder and salesman. Not the chaplain, the bail bondsman and all that.”
He left the partnership, and he and Dorothy opened a shop in Forest Grove, Ore.
“We got it down to about five or six people,” he said, adding they sold their beds out of a storefront at the Fred Meyer in Cornelius, Ore.
They scaled back operations in 1986 and moved to Ridgefield, Wash.
“We got it down to just the two of us,” Gary said, building one of their most popular captains bed designs.
“We could make three of them a day, and we sold them for $175 (each),” Gary said. “We did our $450 (profit) a day, and thought we’d died and went to heaven.”
They stayed in Ridgefield for about 10 years before they found a two-acre lot in Winlock. Located centrally between Seattle and Portland, the move to the property “opened up a whole new market for us,” Gary said. “It was unbelievable.”
The only building on the property was a small metal shop. They constructed a home to live in and installed their wood working machines in the shop. Gradually, they fabricated more beds.
Gary said they built pieces for Microsoft executives — netting themselves a free website in the process — and have crafted units that are tall enough to accommodate people who suffer from back problems.
Over time, Gary decided some of their designs were so unique they should seek patents on them. In 2013, they contacted Lowe to start the process.
“Back in the water bed days, I would design a bed and wholesale it,” Gary said. Sometimes, after selling one of the beds, he said he wouldn’t hear from his wholesale customer again.
“Come to find out, they had copied my design,” he said. “They had taken mine apart, jigged it out and made copies.”
Gary was determined the features he and Dorothy were creating would not be duplicated.
The first patent they received is for a hidden drawer that slides out from under the bed.
The idea came from a woman who asked them to build a three-drawer high bed. “She had more than 100 pairs of high heels,” Gary said. She asked for a six-foot slide-out from the center of the bed where she could store her shoes.
Besides shoes, Gary thought the long chamber could be used as a security drawer where even a rifle could be stored.
“I’m not a gun guy, so it didn’t really enter into my thinking,” he said. “But eventually it did. And that’s patented right there,” he said, demonstrating how the drawer pulls out from what looks like a simple shelf.
Gary and Dorothy have the wood working portion of their beds down to a science. Their workshop, which sits adjacent to their home, is equipped with machinery for each step of the process.
An industrial-sized sander changes the rough maple boards, which they buy from a small mill in Port Angeles, Wash., into the smooth sideboards into which the drawers are installed.
Another machine applies hot lacquer to each piece. Because of the heated application of the stain, dust doesn’t gather on the wooden pieces, Gary said.
A third piece of machinery efficiently scrolls out the grooves on each drawer.
“It’s turned out to be the best thing we ever bought. It made things a lot simpler,” Gary said.
And that simplicity has given Gary more time to create. Including the security drawer, the couple have three patents for their beds. They include features such as slide-out tables and seats for youngsters, a sliding laptop desk for adults and a bookcase footboard. A fourth patent is in process, and Gary is working on a fifth one.
Patents on beds are difficult to acquire. Half of the ones granted are 75 years old or older, Gary said. Before he and Dorothy received their bed patents, the most recent ones were granted in 1996, he said.
“That shows you how hard it is to get a patent on a bed,” he said.
With the official documents in hand, Dorothy and Gary said they plan to start attending trade shows in January. They hope to either sell their business in its entirety or find a manufacturer to purchase their designs.
Gary is philosophical about their chances,.
“If we don’t sell the patents, at the old age home, I’ll be able to say, ‘How many patents you got after you were 76?’ ”
Source: tdn.com
