Andrew "Kyle" Frank: Back-To-Back "Rock the Boat Business Pitch" Winner

Kyle holding his 1st place plaque for the 2013 Rock the Boat Business Pitch  and his invention the Steamin' Suit Bag.

Kyle Frank, 22, is a senior business major with a finance minor who is preparing to graduate on Saturday. He also happens to be one of my good friends here at SRU. You've probably seen him walking around campus or just around Slippery Rock in general. What you may not have known is that Kyle is the back-to-back winner of the SRU Rock the Boat Business Pitch Competition; winning it last spring then winning it again this year. The Rock the Boat Business Pitch is a competition between students basically proposing business plans and being judged on how practical, plausible, and innovative their business is and whether or not they can sell it. Kyle explains that his plan for the competition is to come up with his own business being made out of something and being sold from that. In other words; coming up with something that is his own, producing it, and then moving on to selling it himself.

 Above is a video of Kyle going into more detail about the competition itself, and his approach going in.

Kyle won the competition last year with his own product, the Keepin' Cool Bag. The Keepin' Cool Bag, was his own creation that he came up with for the purpose of being able to transport cold or frozen items long distances without it going to waste or spoiling. He says that living in Stewartstown, PA, being a good 5 to 6 hours away from Slippery Rock, he would have trouble transporting food that needed to stay cold or frozen from home up to SRU. He explained how he would try to bring up meat from home but it would either dethaw or spoil, in a typical cooler, before he got up to school. To him, this was a problem that needed fixing. Personally living 4 hours away from Slippery Rock myself this is a problem that I can actually relate too, we usually just fill a cooler full of ice and be lucky if the stuff keeps until we get up to school. To solve this problem, Kyle developed his Keepin' Cool Bag, which for the most part is a cooler that has an attachment on it to put dry ice in. He tells me that his cooler with the dry ice will keep your stuff cold for about 24 hours or more and will keep it frozen for up to 14 hours. After winning the competition last year, he explained, he started talking to one of the largest dry ice companies in the United States about his cooler. The company, according to Kyle, seemed to like his product and directed him to a sub company called Penguin Ice. After talking with them the plan ended up falling through and Kyle moved on to his next project, the Steamin' Suit Bag.

Shirt before the Steamin' Suit Bag

The Steamin' Suit Bag is the prototype that Kyle won the Rock the Boat Competition with this year. The Suit Bag, as he calls it for short, is a way to get the wrinkles out of your shirt or suit. Ok, yeah there are already ways that you can do that like an iron, a steamer, or just hanging it up in the bathroom with the shower on hot. However, an iron isn't easily transportable, a shower can't always be reliable, and a steamer you have to hold out perfectly straight for minutes while you de-wrinkle your shirt. All inconvenient in their own way. The Suit Bag, for the most part is a Men's Wearhouse suit bag, as he says he likes their suits, that he rigged with a hook-up to have a steamer shoot steam through the bag. The specifics of which he refused to reveal, but I was told there is a lot more that goes into the design than just that. Essentially, you preheat the steamer for a few minutes to get the steam running through the bag then you put your shirt or suit in, let it sit in the bag for about 10 minutes then take it out and let it dry for 3-5 minutes.

This is a video of the Steamin' Suit Bag in the process of de-wrinkling a shirt.

And below is the shirt, the same shirt from above, after going through the Steamin' Suit Bag

Kyle told me that once he graduates he will start seeking an initial patent on his Suit Bag. To get an initial patent he will have to send his idea out and pay $125 and if he is granted an initial patent for his product it will last for a year or two until he can get a full one. Once he gets the initial patent, which he is hoping to get this summer, he will begin sending his idea out to patent companies about getting a full patent on the Suit Bag. The problem, at this point, for Kyle is that the cost of getting a full patent is $10.000 and then even once that is paid off it takes about a year and a half to two years to actually receive the full patent. Once he graduates, he plans on working for a marketing company called Varipoint selling Verizon Fios to begin making the money he needs to get a full patent on his Suit Bag. He also tells me that he is already talking to a building company based in Pittsburgh about designing a smaller steamer and lighter bag for easier travel.

Kyle discusses what his plans past college are and what he will be doing to further the advancement of his inventions.

You would think a kid who has won the Rock the Boat Business Pitch two years in a row had to know this is what he was he was doing coming out of high school, wrong. He told me that it came down to 2 majors and 2 schools. Trying to decide between doing business and biology in college; his plan was if he went to school for biology he was coming to Slippery Rock, if business he was planning on going to Texas Tech. Kyle decided to choose Slippery Rock and go for biology. Part way through the second semester of his freshman year he ended up changing his major to business and stayed here at SRU. Then, at the advice of his professor Dr. Chatterjee, he picked up a finance minor this past semester which he just completed on Thursday saying, "It was the hardest test I've ever taken."

Kyle explains how he got into business and creating his own inventions.

As he said in the video, his first idea came in high school. Being part of the track team he took notice to how much the metal track spikes would wear down after walking on sidewalks. A problem that I am all too familiar with from my days playing high school football. We would have to walk a block on the sidewalk to our practice field, wearing down the spikes on our cleats to the point where we usually had to replace the spikes 2-3 times a season. To defeat this problem he, along with some others, came up with the idea of retractable spikes. The idea was that when walking on hard surfaces the spikes would retract into cleat and not wear them down. This idea, as he says, turned out to be a failure as the spikes ended up just breaking off rather than retracting but still ended up paving the way for his future.

Here is the back of the Steamin' Suit Bag, at the bottom you can see the part where the steamer is connected  to the bag to shoot steam into the bag.

As he was touching on earlier in one of the videos, he says that he's never been too fond of tests. Kyle is more of a hands-on, problem solving kind of guy. This is how he comes up with a lot of his ideas. He likes to look at things that he personally has problems with and thinks, "How can I fix this?" This you can see in his ideas for the Keepin' Cool Bag and the retractable spikes. For the Steamin' Suit Bag, however, he was approached by a friend who talked about his idea of a suitcase press steamer. After talking, Kyle decided the idea would work better using a bag and shooting steam through it. From there they ran with the idea and Kyle took over as the headman. Although admitting that he himself was never really good with tests and paperwork, he brought on his good friend Gil Malek, a 22 year-old marketing major, to be the "paperwork man."

Admitting that he was never good with tests or paperwork, Kyle enlisted the help of Gil, who he called "the student" of their group.

After winning the last two Rock the Boat Business Pitch competitions, and having plans to get a patent and sell his prototypes; for now Kyle is just relishing in the moment of being done and about to graduate. Once he graduates though, he will be hard at work seeing his plans through. At the end of it all he says, "it doesn't matter if it's only two seconds that I helped you, all I care about is that I helped someone."