THUMBSAVER

Thumbsavers is a unique massage therapy tool.
Massage therapists can go deeper and work longer while reducing carpal tunnel syndrome risks, wrist, thumb and joint fatigue or pain. Thumbsavers are not like any other tool because your thumbs are in them! This provides greater sensitivity to the therapist, and a deeper massage for the client.
This is an affordable massage tool that assists therapists by providing deeper tissue massages, while protecting their most valuable commodity: their hands!

Specifications and Features

Large 3.5" long with 1" diamter at opening
Small 3" long with 3/4" diamter at opening

Therapist with sore hands says Thumbsaver provides answer
By MICHAEL POLLICK

michael.pollick@heraldtribune.com
In his eighth year as a massage therapist, Greg Polins' thumbs started to give out on him, and the pain radiated upward: first joint, saddle joint, wrist.

Eventually, after a day of back-to-back massages, Polins was reduced to placing ice packs around his hands at night, in an effort to reduce the swelling.

"I finally got to the point where I was going to have to go and look for another job," said the 43-year-old.

Instead, Polins invented something new -- a deceptively simple piece of soft plastic that slips over the thumb and mimics its shape.

He has a patent pending on the "Thumbsaver," and he is actively marketing it to massage therapists.

Along the way, Polins found out something interesting about Southwest Florida.

Tucked in between the golf courses and boutiques, just below the surface, this area has all the talent you need to turn a concept into a manufactured reality.

He designed a prototype with the help of a Sarasota prosthetics expert. He found his way to a sophisticated Manatee County mechanical engineering team by chatting with the guy who delivers Federal Express packages. He is getting his patent through a guy he met at the gym.

Polins has now pumped about $35,000 and many hours of work into the Thumbsaver project. He is tapped out, but hopes that he is on the threshold of a lifetime of positive cash flow.

Polins could not have taken his Thumbsaver from a sketch to a product being mass-produced in Taiwan without some help.

He had some experience as an entrepreneur, but nobody has all the skills required to bring a manufactured product to market.

"I mean, it's hundreds of procedures," Polins says.

Working his network

Polins' job at Sarasota Life Extension Institute on Clark Road involved both fitness training and massage therapy.

For nearly two years, though, Polins has been moonlighting as an entrepreneur with one goal: designing and manufacturing his brainchild.

It started when he tried reinforcing his thumbs with sports tape, then looked for ways to brace the digits even more.

"When you do this for a couple of hours," said Polins, making a fist and pressing his thumb straight down onto the table, "after a while your thumb isn't straight. It's bent, like this."

Eventually, he started experiencing joint pain that traveled up his thumb through his hand and into his wrist.

"Imagine yourself a massage therapist, and and your hands don't work. You're scared."

His self-help effort went into a higher gear because he became friends with the owner of a neighboring business on Bee Ridge Road, Active Orthotics/Prosthetics.

Polins went to owner Dean Cleall, a board-certified prosthetics designer, looking for an existing thumb brace of some kind.

"We checked with every supplier I could find," Cleall recalled. "We could not find anything that would work in this situation. That was how this whole thing started."

Polins would go home and carve wooden thumbs using a powered hand tool. He'd show up at work on a Monday and hand over his latest thumb to Cleall, who would use it as a mold for a plastic orthotic device in the same shape.

After roughly a dozen tries, Polins had prototypes for thumb covers in two sizes.

Polins claims that as soon as he wore his thumb covers to work, he knew he had something good.

"It takes minimal effort," he said. "I can't imagine not using it."

His new goals: moving the device into mass production while landing a patent from the U.S. Patent Office.

"Months go by when you're doing this," Polins said.

He eventually discovered he was talking boat talk with a guy at the gym who has a strong national reputation in the patent field: attorney Charles Prescott.

Prescott's career has included many ground-breaking patents, including the utility patents on the Hoveround mobility vehicle.

"With Charles, we were just talking about boats," Polins said. "I mentioned my problem with the patent search, and he said, 'You know, I'm a patent attorney. Just send the papers over to me and I'll have a look.'"

"It is now patent pending," Prescott said. "I think it is a good idea."

Trying to move from prototype to mass production was not easy, either.

After a couple of false leads, the FedEx delivery man steered Polins to a Sarasota mold maker, who in turn steered him to Alan Taylor, owner of Pro Design Solutions in Manatee County.

"We received kind of a prosthetic prototype ... for both a male and a female Thumbsaver," Taylor said. With those as a starting point, Taylor used his own design software and equipment to create three-dimensional working drawings and specifications on a computer disk.

He also knew a good factory in Taiwan where Polins could get steel molds made and then have his product injection-molded.