Wheeler dealer ­ Beach attorney hopes to hit pay dirt with a new-fangled wagon

You say there's no sense in reinventing the wheel? Don't tell that to Rick Shapiro, who has done just that.

Shapiro has invented a collapsible wagon with a pivoting wheel assembly that can be folded into a three-inch-thick suitcaselike case. And it's the pivoting wheels that are the revolutionary idea.

"Today's consumers want products that are portable, small and thin," says Shapiro, a Virginia Beach personal injury attorney with Wilson, Hajek & Shapiro.

After two years of dreaming about, doodling and designing collapsible wagons and carts, Shapiro has a prototype, which was built by Phil Gurecki of Accurate Machine in Norfolk, and recently received the go-ahead from the U.S. Patent Office, where three patent applications are pending. Since getting word from the Patent Office this summer, Shapiro has been in contact with about five national manufacturers in hopes of getting his wagons licensed.

He is currently awaiting word from one of the companies, a leading toy manufacturer that has expressed significant interest in his design. "It really looks pretty promising," Shapiro says. Still, he's reluctant to name the manufacturer until a contract is signed. "You never know, anything can happen."

If that deal doesn't come together, Shapiro won't give up. His next step will be to gain financial support from investors and form a company to manufacture the plastic wagons and carts. "I hope to license my designs ... rather than form my own company. I'm practicing law full-time, and I don't want to change that."

In October, Shapiro is taking his wagon to the Yankee Invention Expo in Waterbury, Conn.

The idea for the collapsible wagon came to Shapiro, a father of two young children, as he realized how cumbersome it is to pack kids' paraphernalia for trips, even simple trips to the beach.

"A couple of years ago, I started daydreaming about a wagon that would just fold flat and go in the trunk," he says. "I did a lot of doodling and drawing for several months, and I wasn't convinced that I had anything worthwhile.

"Then I decided to think like a corporation."

Shapiro put the doodling aside and launched a search of all patents that existed for collapsible carts and wagons. "Some were interesting and some were impractical," he says.

As he reviewed the designs, Shapiro learned something that fascinated him. "All of the wagons and carts had fixed axles." And on every cart, everything folded up except the wheels. "I never found anything smaller than eight inches thick," he said.

Shapiro realized that wagons basically hadn't changed, except for being made out of plastic, since the first patent for Radio Flyer in 1917.

Shapiro went back into his garage and, using materials from modeling clay to foam insulation, began to design wagons that could collapse with the wheels attached. "What I worked on was trying to design the absolute thinnest prototype I could with everything attached."

"One night I walked into the house and told my wife, 'I think I've really got something," he recalls of the moment he devised his pivoting wheel assembly. "This could be significant. I really haven't seen anything [in existing patents] that has changed the way wagons were made until this."

— Lorri Montgomery

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