Pouring His Heart Out Ahwatukee inventor is saving businesses and consumers money BY PAUL MARYNIAK Steve Abbit has had a busy couple of years doing things that most people never could imagine doing. When the longtime Ahwatukee resident wasn’t on the phone at all hours of the day and night lining up companies around the world to execute his vision, he was grappling with metal cylinders, plastic molds and cardboard boxes. That all this activity started with a bottle of Baby Ray’s Barbecue Sauce is startling enough. But when you know what this activity created—and the potential Abbit sees in it—you could easily end up thinking, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Abbit has invented the mother of all funnels. Christened Freestand, it’s an adjustable funnel that fits just about any bottle, jar, can or other liquid container. Its purpose is simple: draining every last drop of liquid from those containers without having to shake them, spank them or even hold them. Freestand’s applications—and market potential—appear endless. It can drain bottles, jars and other containers that hold almost anything you can pour: ketchup and barbecue sauce, moisturizer and other liquid cosmetics, detergent and dish soap, even motor oil and the containers baristas pour flavored syrups from. “There are guys out there who want to use this for transmission fluid and brake fluid and very expensive motor oils and things like that,” he said. “I’ve got friends who are race car drivers and spend $98 a quart for some of their fluids and now you start thinking about this: If they waste 20% on average of all fluids that come out of bottles and it’s 100 bucks a quart, that adds up.” Abbit believes he can persuade the Jiffy Lubes, Starbucks and Mary Kays of the world to see that his product can save them big bucks in product costs and worker time. Freestand is not all about dollars and cents for Abbit, a retired psychologist and corporate consultant who, at 50, has paved a new career path. “I’ve made a lot of companies a lot of money and I don’t want to do that any-
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Steve Abbit, who helped create LifeLock, the identity-protection service, is pushing his latest invention, Freestand. (Submitted photo)
more,” says Abbit, who helped invent Lifelock, the identity-protection service. “I want to help you and me,” he explains. “I want to save us money. I want to save our environment. I don’t want to do corporate anymore. … It’s bureaucratic and there’s lots of red tape and lots of politics and I just don’t want that. I want to feel good about what I do.” Abbit figures Freestand can help save the planet—and even some marriages. His research has discovered that 27% of couples “fight about getting the last drop” out of one container or another. “Then there are those people who are cutters,” Abbit said. “They just cut open bottles and they scoop it out. Well, 14% of the time, those people wind up in the hospital.” As for the environment, he cites data indicating that every one of the approximate 79.2 million families in America uses 150 plastic food, cosmetic and other containers annually. If every family had Freestand, he reasons, “Americans could save 3.6 billion plastic bottles from ending up in landfills” while saving $250 to $400 per year buying new containers of ketchup, motor oil, makeup and whatever else they normally replace before every last drop is gone. Every step he took to develop the
$29.99 Freestand involved painstaking, methodical and sometimes frustrating hours as he assembled a small army of independent contractors to give birth to his baby. And it really did start with a bottle of Baby Ray’s. He was barbecuing chicken on his lakefront patio in Lakewood when he started pounding the bottom of the upside-down bottle, then finally laid it against another bottle in an effort to drain the remnants. “I’m thinking to myself, man, I have done this like a thousand times and it falls over and I started thinking, ‘How many people experience this?’” Abbit got on Google and eBay, looking in vain for something that would save him the time-consuming—and somewhat tiresome—task of slapping container bottoms or just holding one upside down to drain the contents. Then, he started doodling on napkins, sketching designs for the device he couldn’t find online. From there, he spent more than 18 months before he came up with Freestand. It has three aluminum, telescopic legs that lock in place at three different lengths that hold a high-density poly-
ethylene funnel. Two detachable narrow arms made with the same polyethylene can be snapped into the funnel rim to hold any container upright as it drains away. The polyethylene is BPA free, free of the cancer-causing chemicals found in lower-grade plastic. “I’m totally overengineered,” he says. “It’s made to last forever, and that was really what I wanted. Every single piece of this is recyclable, including the box.” In addition, there are disposable funnel liners. Each box comes with 15, and when someone runs out they can just go on myfreestand.com and order another 15 without charge—for as long as they want. Each piece of Abbit’s invention took many trials and errors to refine. “I’ve been through probably four or five different iterations,” Ebbit explains. “The first iteration was a catastrophe. It was a major failure. I probably hit a thousand reasons why I should have stopped. “But I knew I could get there if I just kept going. It’s like the light bulb, right? There are 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb. So, I came up with 1,500 ways not to make Freestand.” Lining up the experts to help him execute his design was as complicated as his invention is simple. He needed engineers—one for Freestand and one for the box it comes in. He worked with protypes on a 3D printer with an engineer in Florida and then with Moldworx, a Gilbert injection-molding company, to produce a working prototype. The legs were particularly challenging. “I probably interviewed 20 companies that make these legs,” he recalled. “I researched all kinds of different telescoping mechanisms, and I wanted something that locked because what I didn’t want to have happen is have somebody put a container up there and it slides down,” he explained. In his early designs, he used plastic legs—but they collapsed. He finally settled on aluminum legs with stainless steel nubs that lock into place. He spent months calling companies to get manufacturers on board. Because domestic manufacturers www.LovinLife.com
