Charleston Magazine: Shifting Gears - Jules Weldon & Stacey Pierce
Having raised six children, Paul and Jerie Weldon well understood the challenge of hauling gear. Twenty-four years ago, while watching a mother of three wrangle her stuff after a day at the beach, they thought there must be a better way. “She was miserable,” explains their daughter Jules. “My parents went up and napkin-sketched out this lounger. If you flipped it up, it became like a dolly.”
Paul patented their idea and tried to market it, but after several starts and stops, he shelved the cart. Fast-forward to 2010: Jules had been working as a consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers when she awoke in the middle of the night thinking about her dad’s beach cart invention. “I called him at 8:30 that morning and said, ‘Hey, Dad, what do you think about me trying to take your product to market?’” Weldon recalls. “He started crying. It was a dream come true.”
Paul assigned the patent to Jules, and she partnered with a manufacturing company, to which she signed over majority ownership. “It was great for the first six months, and then it turned out to not be great,” she recalls. “Our values didn’t align.”
Leave a comment