By Claire Lareau

It is late January 1979. The Village People’s new song “Y.M.C.A.” is selling at a rate of over 150,000 copies a day; David Attenborough’s show Life on Earth has just premiered on BBC One; The Pittsburgh Steelers just beat the Dallas Cowboys in the 13th Super Bowl; and, most notably, eight-year-old inventor Mark Lareau has just created his first invention.

Inspired by the pneumatic doors in Star Wars, Lareau dissembled his family humidifier and assembled his own automatic door. He ventured to Harrisonburg, Virginia’s humble and hip Radio Shack to buy a switch and mounted it on his bedroom wall like a doorbell. He then rigged up pulleys and cords so that the humidifier’s motor would spin and open up his door for as long as he pressed the switch. Without an instruction manual or a Google search, Lareau had crafted his first-ever creation. He notes, “It was awesome.”

My dad Mark Lareau now lives in Richmond and commutes to Boston a few days a week for his office job as an executive at Liberty Mutual. He spends his workdays attending Zoom meetings and sending long emails to his coworkers. But, a little to the left of his wooden desk, out of the lens of his fish-eye camera, lies an industrial-sized 3D printer. If you ever take the time to google “Mark Lareau,” and scroll far past Lareau’s LinkedIn profile, you’ll find an IMDb page naming him the star of the 13th episode of Shark Tank’s 13th season.

Shark Tank is an American reality TV show that premiered in August 2009. It features a series of entrepreneurs who go on the show and try to convince the Sharks to invest in their budding products. The Sharks are five tremendously successful entrepreneurs: Mark Cuban, Babara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, and Kevin O’Leary (AKA Mr. Wonderful.)

Since he got an iPhone, Lareau has always kept a list of invention ideas on his Notes app. It is over 200 items long, growing at a steady rate of, give-or-take, one idea every two weeks. Many people would not understand his commitment to this list, but he says, “I’m just a curious guy, and I’m always thinking about how something could work better.”

Each idea, typed in Arial size 13 so that his “old eyes can read it,” is accompanied by an explanation. Perforated Taco Shells: so you can eat bite-sized pieces without it crumbling. Portable PVC Carnival Style Dunk Chair: would be fun for the kids in the pool. If you scroll about 45 items down, you’ll find Lareau’s most prized idea: The Blowzee: handheld fan to blow out candles.

He added The Blowzee to his list in mid-2018 after realizing how gross it was to eat birthday cake iced with children’s slobber. The idea of The Blowzee (called the Blowbee 2000 at the time) became a running joke in the family. After a birthday party with Collegiate parents Marcie and Mark Apelt in early 2019, Lareau mentioned his silly idea, and Marcie Apelt commented, “That is so stupid that it might sell a ton.” Lareau reflects now, “She was right.”

Lareau recruited Mark Apelt as his business partner to improve and build on the idea. He comments, “When we started the project, I asked Mark if I could stay in the background. I have a corporate job, and I didn’t want to have to explain what a Blowzee was if I were ever to look for another job. It was just too goofy.” Lareau continued, “The one exception was if we made it to Shark Tank, as that was the show we used to always watch as a family.”

Apelt and Lareau jumped into the development of The Blowzee. Lareau comments, “The development process was probably the most fun part; I learned a ton.” They started by creating multiple prototypes: “The first one was just a wine cork in a PVC pipe that triggered a switch when you blew on it. I love PVC pipes. The prototypes started bad, so we just kept making them better and better.” As they crafted better and better prototypes, they realized that they needed to find a pressure switch that was small enough and cheap enough to work.

The first 3D-printed version of The Blowzee. Photo credit: Mark Lareau.

Lareau says, “I was talking to a local engineer about it, and he suggested that I look into how vape pens are made, as they likely had a similar mechanism. With a vape pen, when you suck in, the switch activates to heat the vape fluid. I needed something that would activate when you blew out. I went to the gas station and bought a lemon vape pen to see what would happen if I blew into the exhaust hole. It worked! The vape smoke came out the other end. It turned out that vape sensors just needed to be turned backward. So I started working with China to get sensor samples for our prototypes.”

They created their next prototype with help from all around the globe. After 3D-printing many failed designs at the Libbie Mill Public Library, Lareau found Gogic Rade, a Serbian CAD engineer, who enhanced and fixed their designs for $25. They then hired an injection molding engineer out of Wisconsin to ensure the designs would mold properly, for $100. Finally, they found an electrical engineer out of China to refine their electrical schematics. Lareau says, “I forget exactly how much we spent pre-production, but it was maybe $2000 in all. That included patents, incorporation, and trademarks. That amount is crazy cheap. We went from a goofball idea to having done enough design and diligence to put an order in at a factory, while spending very little money in the big picture. You could easily spend 10-100 thousand dollars on this part of the production, but it was more fun this way.”

The final version of The Blowzee. Photo credit: Mark Lareau.

Because the production of The Blowzee began during COVID-19 quarantine, Lareau and Apelt were unable to travel to the Chinese factory to see the production in action. However, Lareau says, “It was surreal to have the factory email me videos of their progress. It opened a whole new set of topics to learn about: safety standards, packaging standards, customs, ocean freight, and more. Each step was something new that we just sat down and learned. If it got too complicated, we’d just find an expert online, ideally international, to help us out. We brought on a Pakistani video editor to build online ads for us.”

On Lareau’s 50th birthday in May 2021, The Blowzee hit. Apelt had done some press for The Richmond Times-Dispatch and other local newspapers. Lareau woke up on the morning of his birthday to a stream of texts telling him that Jimmy Fallon had mentioned The Blowzee in the prior night’s opening monologue. That morning, on the drive to school, we turned on the radio, and syndicated morning radio host Elvis Duran mentioned The Blowzee on his morning show. Lareau remembers, “We were in major newspapers around the world, and we started getting a bunch of inbound requests to be the Blowzee representative for Brazil, Spain, and other countries. It was so ridiculous.”

Lareau cannot talk about most of the application and filming process for Shark Tank due to a contract he signed when the show brought him on, but he shared a few of the most memorable details. He and Apelt flew out to Los Angeles for the filming. They had their own trailer for hair and makeup. Lareau says, “A neat thing about Shark Tank is that there are no re-takes, and the Sharks don’t know anything about you or your product. It was stressful, because you knew if you screwed up, your grandkids would one day be able to see it.”

The Blowzee set-up on Shark Tank. Photo credit: @SonyPicturesTelevision via YouTube.

The Blowzee did not get a deal, but they got a delightful comment from Shark investor Mr. Wonderful: “I hate everything about this.” By contrast, billionaire Mark Cuban said that their production story was “The American Dream.” Lareau says, “I don’t think we screwed up. We didn’t expect a deal going in, as we had only sold around $12,000. The Sharks are looking for more proven products than that.” 

Lareau and Apelt had picked out a high-end steakhouse to go to if they got a deal, and a low-end dive bar to go to if they did not. Lareau says, “The producer argued that it was a success even without the deal, so we went to the steak house in Manhattan Beach. Afterward, Mark Apelt and I were standing on the deserted street talking about how amazing the journey was, and we saw Mark Cuban walking up to us. I said, ‘Mark! It’s Mark and Mark from The Blowzee.’ He walked over, and we chatted for a while about how we did. He’s a great guy.”

The night of the airing, they rented out Hardywood Taproom for a viewing party with about 100 friends and family. Lareau says, “I wasn’t embarrassed that we didn’t get a deal. For me, it was a celebration of the journey and a desire to share it with my friends.” They sold out their entire inventory of The Blowzee the night of the airing and shut down the company shortly after. Component and shipping prices were inflating, and they had astonishingly low return rates (2%). Lareau comments, “There were a lot of angry customers. They went from never having heard of the Blowzee to The Blowzee ruining their birthday due to a failed Chinese solder. We realized that the headaches involved in scaling it to a point where the money would be meaningful just weren’t worth it. It was a nice clean break.”

Lareau reflects, “One of my biggest learnings from the Blowzee is that physical product is a hassle. It’s easy to get into, as you can make a prototype in days, but it’s hard to get all the details right. Things get damaged in shipping, injection molds fail, things get caught in customs, things get lost in the mail, batteries fail…  Physical product is hard. So since then, I’ve just focused on digital things.  Once you build it, every additional one costs you essentially nothing.  I’ve built a bunch of things—mostly AI (Artificial Intelligence) this year. Some by myself and some with offshore help.  Nothing has hit yet, but I bet one does. Life is crazy that way.”

Featured image credit: @SonyPicturesTelevision via YouTube.