excerpt from Washington Post
By Margaret Webb Pressler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 15, 2000; Page F10

inBusiness
Eureka; Whether a patent finds its market or no,
it always changes the inventor's life.

Neal Weigel has two luxuries few inventors ever enjoy: the money and the time.

Weigel, 50, spent his career in international trade and telecommunications, at one point running his own company. But two years ago he stumbled onto an idea for a product that struck him as so clever, and so marketable, that he quit his job to work on his invention full time.

"Oftentimes when I get involved in something, I can't let go of it," he says.

Weigel's epiphany came when he was trying to fix the dead spots on his lawn, where grass wouldn't grow because leaves seemed to concentrate there. Every time he tried to plant new grass--the fall being the optimal time for this--the seedlings would be smothered in places by yet another carpet of leaves without constant raking. So Weigel fashioned his own solution: He pulled a section of netting taut over a recessed dead patch and staked it to the slightly higher ground of the grassy lawn. That way, even when the leaves fell, the seedlings would still get air.

Not only did Weigel's grass take root, but cleanup was a breeze. "When I went to peek under the netting, it occurred to me that, 'Gosh, I don't have to rake these leaves. All I have to do is roll it up and dispose of the netting.' It's great."

Weigel immediately saw mass-market potential. If he could get the price low enough, he figured, people would buy Leaf It once a year, perhaps millions of people. After building a machine in his garage that folds giant rolls of netting into small packages, Weigel began marketing Leaf It to retailers. But not everyone saw the brilliance of his idea.

"I was talking to people in the lawn and garden field, and they would say, 'People aren't going to do that, they're not going to put this on their lawn,' " Weigel recalls. "And that was really discouraging."

And then there was the buyer for Home Depot in New Jersey, whose reaction was: "What's this going to do to my rake and leaf blower sales?"

Last year Weigel sold about 50,000 units as pond covers, but his sales have been picking up for lawn use, he says, ever since Leaf It was mentioned in a gardening magazine.

He figures he'll sell about 240,000 this year from his garage headquarters, and he's still hoping to convince a buyer at Home Depot. He has also had nibbles from a few catalogues.

Weigel has invested abut $80,000 and countless hours in his invention. Leaf It is already profitable, but at a retail cost of $8 it is still too expensive to become the disposable essential Weigel envisions. He can't lower the price, though, until he's making far more units, far faster.

"It's frustrating, because you want to get the things going as fast as possible," he says. "But I'm having a ball."

Weigel is now developing a whole line of products for lawn care--he calls his company Seasonal Solutions. But Leaf It, he is sure, has the most potential.