When Raquel Graham’s two children refused to wear scarves they found too bulky and itchy, she was determined to find some other way to protect them from Chicago’s cold winters.
Graham had soon created a chic leopard-print version for herself. When friends and family saw it and started asking to order their own, she sensed she was onto something and, in 2014, decided to show her samples at a trade show. She came away with a $50,000 order to license her NEKZ neck wraps in the colors of 40 Top NCAA colleges, for sale at Follett's on-campus stores.
Graham found a local factory that would do a small run and soon found herself in the manufacturing business, making versions for both children and adults. She used her first purchase order as the basis to obtain financing.
It was a smart bet that raised her visibility and led to orders from the campus retailer Follett and an ecommerce site called The Grommet, which sells innovative products from local small businesses. Eventually Home Shopping Network (HSN) noticed her product and invited her to be on the network. When the line launched on HSN in 2016, it sold out in 20 minutes.
Today, her company, Roq Innovation, also sells Headlightz, ski caps with built-in LED lamps to illuminate dark running paths, on HSN. With her one-woman business plugged into the supportive network at the prestigious ICNC Incubator and approaching seven-figure revenue, she recently secured warehouse space to continue to grow the brand. She recently became a board member at DePaul University's Women's Entrepreneurship Institute.
I learned about Graham when I found out she’d be speaking on a panel I’m moderating at the nonprofit Chicago Inventor’s Organization’s annual conference this Saturday, Oct. 6. Her story of building a one-woman innovation and manufacturing business and making it onto HSN offers interesting insights for other entrepreneurs who've dreamed up new inventions. Here are some takeaways from her story.
Raquel Graham has built a presence on HSN with inventions such as a less-bulky scarf alternative and a ski cap with a built-in LED light to illuminate dark running paths.
Stay open to unexpected opportunities. Graham, 49, didn’t start out planning to be an inventor. After graduating from Wesleyan College, she became an analyst at JPMorgan Chase, then—tapping into a childhood passion for contemporary dance—became assistant director of Harlem Hospital Dance Clinic in New York City.
After getting married, she moved to Chicago with her husband and became vice president and head of marketing for Ebony magazine. “Then I realized publishing was on its way out,” she recalls. To reinvent her career, she enrolled at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University to earn her MBA.
Life had its own plans for her, and in the first month of school, Graham discovered she was pregnant. When her second child was born prematurely, she realized she didn’t want to work in a corporate career anymore. “I wanted to create something or find something where I could spend more time with my family,” she recalls. Instead of job hunting after she received her MBA, she started Roq Marketing Group, a consultancy, in 2009, offering strategic marketing advice to corporate clients. “A lot of them were Ebony clients,” she says.
As her children grew, Graham found herself facing a challenge that frustrates many moms: making sure they bundled up in the cold. When she came up with her NEKZ wraps as a solution, she didn’t let the fact that she’d never invented a product or manufactured one stop her. She created her own prototype and then got professional advice on how to perfect it.
The DIY approach works for many inventors, says John Khalil, founder of Patent Lot, a site that connects inventors and attorneys, and inventor of Scent2o, a natural product that uses the power of scent to makes plain water take on flavors such as root beer or lemonade, who will also speak on the panel.
Also important, Khalil says, is to do your homework with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office to make sure you’re inventing something that’s truly new. “It pays to know what’s out there,” he says.
Step into the limelight. Graham had no TV background, and could easily have talked herself out of appearing on HSN. Instead, she embraced the challenge, tapping her background doing corporate presentations to perfect her pitch and rehearsing again and again before she did her demo tape.
Still, she knew there would be a learning curve and threw herself into mastering the skills she needed to succeed. “It’s not easy,” she acknowledges. “You have a producer [speaking on a microphone] in your ear. You have to learn to work with the host and follow your cues. You’re also reading [from a screen] to see how well your product is doing on air. There’s no script, so you go with the flow.” Fortunately, she discovered, she was good at winging it.
Keep expanding your repertoire. Graham could have stopped with one product, but she decided to see how far she could take her idea of building a company around “solutions to make life easier.” When, as an early-evening jogger, she found herself searching for a way to illuminate the paths in front of her, she came up with the idea for Headlightz. The beanies, which have a rechargeable LED light, debuted on HSN in November 2017, selling out during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Graham had some big health challenges along the way. Two years ago, after an early misdiagnosis, she was found to have pneumonia blastomycosis, a fungal type of pneumonia that became life-threatening. By the time doctors realized what was wrong, she had suffered lung and heart failure and had a stroke. At one point, she was put on a ventilator. She had to learn to walk again, in a recovery process that took a year. Last November, she finally finished her rehabilitation.