An innovator in underwear readies to launch
“Who would have guessed I”™d be doing this with underwear?” Susanne Leary Shoemaker remarked to a recent visitor to her home office.
She stood flanked by manikins, one dressed in men”™s cotton boxer shorts and another draped in a woman”™s simple yet elegantly cut black swimsuit, in a corner aerie of her 19th-floor apartment in the Halstead New Rochelle overlooking the Long Island Sound and the city”™s sprawling, wind-and-rain-battered downtown. A pile of wraparound women”™s and men”™s briefs and boxers ”” among them, a camouflage-patterned prototype for female veterans living with disabling wounds from America”™s last decade and more of war ”” lay on the office carpet.
A former art teacher at private schools in Westchester and editorial proofreader at The New Yorker, Shoemaker at midlife has become a business entrepreneur as the founder ”” and, for now, sole employee ”” of Undercare Inc. Her company soon will launch online marketing of specialty undergarments whose patented design and Velcro fasteners enable people whose mobility is impaired by age or disabilities and those recovering from surgeries or injuries to dress themselves. In March, she will travel to Washington, D.C., to compete with nine other female entrepreneurs from across the nation in the finals of the U.S Small Business Administration”™s annual InnovateHER: Innovating for Women Business Challenge.
Microsoft, the SBA”™s competition partner, will put up $70,000 in prize money for the top three award-winners. The first-place prize of $40,000 represents about 10 percent of Shoemaker”™s startup costs in the five years since she formed her company as a subchapter S corporation.
What would become her certified woman-owned business in 2011 began a few years earlier in moments of observation and empathetic inspiration at the YMCA in White Plains, where Shoemaker, a former longtime Bronxville resident, regularly swam.
She found herself in the locker-room company of a group of elderly women in an arthritis aquatics class. After their swim, she watched the spirited women struggle with a long pincher-tipped pole to pull on their clothes. Impaired by arthritic limbs and an unwieldy tool, “They would sit there for 20 minutes dressing themselves and trying to be independent,” she said. “I was struck by their desire to be independent and self-dressing.”
“I started trying to spatially figure out” a better solution to the daily task of dressing with impaired mobility. Drawing on her past training in the bones and musculature of the human figure at rest and in motion when studying for her master”™s degree at New York Academy of Art, she sketched out her ideas. She developed a basic design that would enable a standing person to put on underwear without balancing on one leg or bending at the knee or hip.
To her family and friends, Shoemaker had often shown an inventive mind. A recent example? Finding her eyesight dimming in middle age, she conceived the idea of a nose clasp with attached magnifying glass to aid women applying their cosmetics.
But like her other inventive concepts, her dignity-restoring specialty underwear might have remained on the drawing board without encouragement and a challenge from family members.
“My children said, ”˜Mom, you always have these good ideas but you don”™t do anything about them,”™” she recalled. It was a spur to action.
About five years ago, she reconnected with a client at her husband”™s New York City law firm, Dal LaMagna, the founder of Tweezerman, a beauty tool manufacturer, who had recently published “Raising Eyebrows: A Failed Entrepreneur Finally Gets It Right.” LaMagna became the aspiring entrepreneur”™s first business adviser, guiding Shoemaker through the formation of her company and continuing to this day as a valued mentor.
The Westchester resident also turned closer to home for assistance. With a limited background in business, “I availed myself of all the free and available entrepreneurial assistance, much of it centered on women,” she said.
In 2011, she completed the Women”™s Enterprise Development Center”™s 15-week entrepreneurship training class. The business plan she developed there won her WEDC”™s $5,000 Lanza Award in 2012. “WEDC has been amazing,” said Shoemaker, who followed her group instruction with individual counseling at the nonprofit in White Plains.
Shoemaker also sought guidance from The Acceleration Project in Scarsdale, a nonprofit that provides professional women to assist small businesses with strategy, research and training. And WEDC put her in touch with IBM”™s mentorship program in Purchase. She has worked with the Procurement and Technical Assistance Center in Westchester and Rockland counties, an agency that guides small businesses in procuring government contracts of the kind that Shoemaker aims to obtain to supply Veterans Affairs hospitals with underwear for their combat-injured patients, and the state Small Business Development Center at Rockland Community College.
She has also tapped the startup consulting services offered by the Westchester chapter of SCORE, where a retired garment industry executive has been especially helpful as she navigated Manhattan”™s Fashion District and the world of lingerie designers, fit models and fabric suppliers. “They”™ve been really great, pushing me to get launched,” she said of her SCORE advisers.
“All these are really the equivalent of getting an MBA, I think,” said Shoemaker.
Having developed a prototype women”™s”™ panty, Shoemaker in 2011 visited the Manhattan office of Kenyon and Kenyon, a white-shoe intellectual property law firm. “I walk through the door and I have this hand-sewn underwear and a hand-drawn design,” she said. “That was my fear, that they would think this is a ridiculous idea.”
The firm”™s patent and trademark attorneys instead thought she had a marketable product and agreed to represent her. In 2013, Shoemaker obtained her first design patent for her specialty undergarments. “That was very exciting to get the patent,” she said.
There have been setbacks in finding a reliable manufacturer for her product line. Work done in China was shoddy and botched. “You just learn from your experience,” she said.
After her China experiment, “I”™m committed to manufacturing in the U.S.A., so I”™ve done a lot of traveling around the South visiting factories.” She has found a production partner at Industries of the Blind in Greensboro, N.C.
“It”™s very important to have quality control. That”™s”™ why it”™s easier to do it in the U.S. than to do it in China,” she said.
Undercare”™s founder said her primary target market is “the senior demographic. If you look at the numbers, the age-wave tsunami is upon us” with the Baby Boomer population. Computer-savvy, those seniors increasingly are online shoppers and demand quality and comfort in their purchases.
“There”™s going to be a severe shortage of caregivers too with the age-wave tsunami,” she said. “So anything you can do to lighten that load is important.” Her wraparound undergarments will free caregivers from that dressing task while bringing a measure of “dignity and independence” to those impaired by age and infirmities.
“Right now I”™m a whisper away from being in production,” Shoemaker said. Her first line of women”™s”™ and men”™s”™ underwear will be available in March on her company website, undercare.com.
Among retailers, Nordstrom has shown interest in her products; Shoemaker said she hopes to do an online trial with the fashion retailer with “a soft rollout” in its stores. “I”™m also going after surgical pharmacies,” she said.