Inventor's Story: How I Curved the Shower Curtain, not the Rod.

Standing tall at 6'3", I felt cramped in my shower. It turns out I wasn't alone -- not in a Psycho kind of way -- but that millions of bathers of all shapes and sizes would love more shower space.

 

I wanted to avoid the remodeling hassle, expense, tile damage and ecological wastefulness of a curved shower rod. So I wondered ... why not just curve the curtain away? But how? Gravity pulls shower curtains straight down. And the shower curtain effect brings it so close that it sticks to me! I had to invent a self-expanding shower curtain.

My Eureka moment came while standing in the shower. Pleating! I quickly dried off and started cutting and folding sheets of plastic. But like an Origami puzzle, it was really hard! From my small studio in Manhattan's Lower East Side, I agonized over endless shapes, materials and designs. All failures! But I didn't give up. Eventually -- many years, actually -- I found the perfectly balanced shape. I folded and taped a prototype and ... it worked! The folds and simple force of gravity created a soft natural curve. This was my first working prototype in early 2016.

Then I needed to make more for testing. In May 2016, I hand-made 10 curtains, 3D-printed 60 rings -- thank you, John at Voxel Magic! -- and snapped them onto 60 hand-cut folding window sections. It took me 3 months. Then I asked 10 friends and neighbors to test these more advanced prototypes. They loved them! I made some minor adjustments with their valuable feedback. By July, after an unexpected review in Gizmodo, pre-orders came in on my website. But I wasn't ready. Until then, I had been 100% self-funded, paying for patenting, prototyping, testing and more... but now, I urgently needed more funds for manufacturing setup, liability insurance and shipping costs. So I opened a crowdlending campaign; 115 small lenders (most of them complete strangers) helped me reach my $9,000 goal in 48 hours!

I shipped in October 2016. It earned great reviews, averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars. Customers made some final suggestions, which required more design work than I anticipated. In fact, I had to improve durability and manufacturability (to keep costs low). This derailed me for many years because I could not find contract manufacturer to take on my project. Inventors have a bad reputation because we are usually control-freaks, in a hurry and broke. (Yup, that was me.)

So I had to abandon the project while working freelance jobs. I was then struck by a New York Taxi (he ran the light). No sooner was I recovered from multiple surgeries over 6 months that I had to rush overseas to be a emergency caregiver for my mom and grand-aunt. (We're all fine now).

Throughout, in my spare time, I'd read up to learn about different manufacturing techniques and the folding properties of various plastics. Molecular reorientation, anyone? Then it became obvious that what I was asking the plastic to do was, well ... both impractical and mechanically redundant, if not impossible. Out of necessity, I created the folding window: an all-in-one way to have the top section of the shower liner be both rigid (to tip out) and flexible (to fold like an accordion).

So in January 2018, I borrowed money from close friends (backed against the my personal injury taxi lawsuit). I then launched a Kickstarter campaign using pictures of my single prototype. The campaign funded 100% in 3 days! I recruited a team of experts, and we spent the summer of 2018 tooling up. We shipped in Fall 2018. After valuable customer feedback, we planned to tool-up for mass manufacturing.

That's when I started this blog with monthly updates. You can see that we had lots of manufacturing and material problems. I spent all 2019 trying to find more reliable sources. As before, most US factories wouldn't accept my business because they prefer making fancy high-end products, not low-cost plastic items. One wrote back: "Stop wasting everybody's time."

So I worked a job, saved up, and went overseas. By October 2019, I had given up. I could not find trustworthy partners to fold my window in the right way, at the right cost & speed.

Back to the USA, where manufacturing was making a comeback. I consulted chemical engineers and changed my design a bit. Now manufacturers were much more interested. We could do this domestically using off-the shelf plastics and more modern equipment. By March 2020, we had a basic machine and good plastic. Unfortunately, I got very sick with COVID-19, so the project was delayed again. But I recovered. And we shipped, eventually.

In August 2021, our domestic manufacturing capacity was further upgraded. Now we can deliver More Shower SPACE at a good price and on a mass scale!