I am often asked: "How did you come up with the idea for Versacarry®?" Oddly, I owe the creative spark to a fire in June of 2010 that took my home and all my belongings.
I was shocked that everything I owned was now a pile of rubble in a blackened hole. Thankfully, my younger brother and I were not home sleeping when the fire broke out. I will forever be grateful that we were both up and out of the house early that day. But unfortunately, my German Shepherd was at home, and I lost her.
The day my house burned down, it was pouring rain, and as I watched the firefighters try to stop the blaze, I can remember how ironic it was to have everything burning up on a day it was pouring rain. Sadly, neither the firefighters nor the storm could stop the spread of the fire to the rest of the property. As a result, everything I owned was a total and complete loss.
The next day I began working with my insurance adjuster to figure out the next step in the process of trying to piece back together my life. I had lost everything and needed to go shopping for essentials. Did I buy underwear and a new toothbrush? No, my first purchase was a handgun. Little did I know that purchase would be my first step toward my first patent.
I had good insurance and was fairly compensated; a person only fully realizes how valuable good insurance is once you lose it all. With the compensation for the small 500-square-foot home I lost, I began planning to rebuild my new home. I had decided to live in a small 27ft travel trailer while the new house was being built. This plan enabled me to save a little money, be on the job site to supervise the construction and do part of the work myself. During this construction period, the idea of Versacarry® came to me.
I had purchased a Ruger LCP and a Sig P238 back-to-back and encountered the same problem with both. I could not find anything to easily and comfortably carry either of these guns. As a gun owner, I have experienced this problem many times before. After buying a new gun, you have the task of searching for the right holster.
If you pick something too bulky or that is a pain to put on, you find yourself slowly reverting to carrying less, ultimately defeating the purpose of having a CHL. So I began searching for something lightweight, effective, and simple to put on because I knew I would be more likely to use it if it were simple to operate. While at a doctor's office, I had a sudden idea: why not use the common feature shared by guns of the same caliber, which is their barrel size? I was excited to get back to my travel trailer to work on this solution.
As soon as I got back, I began digging for parts to throw together a prototype. I went to the kitchen drawer, which, before the fire, had housed a variety of different objects and forgotten things that could be used to construct a quick version. The drawer's contents were limited, but I was able to create a very rough-looking model after a short trip to Lowes. After a few days of use, I decided the idea had real promise, and I could see others finding it useful as well. This led to a big challenge. How could I financially get this project going? Patents and machinery to build a new product from scratch would not be cheap. Before losing my home, I did not have a lot of savings or financial resources. The most money I ever had was the day I received a check from the insurance company to rebuild my home. At this point, I faced a decision. I could go the safe route and build a house or use the money to start a new company. I had already invested money in rebuilding my home and already had a very expensive slab poured, but I stopped the build and diverted all my funding into Versacarry®.