InFocus Magazine

What passes for soil in Comox too often proves to be a challenge for even the most intrepid and energetic of gardeners. And it was in striking a bit of ubiquitous hardpan that Paul Carr was hit with an inspiration.

Adding to the mix of that inspiration was the fact he had just come home from some mountain biking. Yes, sometimes it’s all about synchronicity.

“I was in the outside garden and I needed to plant some bulbs,” says Carr. “It was a new bed and hadn’t really been cultivated yet. I grabbed a trowel and I found I couldn’t dig. I couldn’t get the tool in the ground. I concluded that the conventional trowel was kind of a stupid tool because you can’t apply any force to it.”

With considerable background as a mechanic, Carr decided he could improve on the time-honored trowel configuration by adding an element that would permit the gardener to apply some genuine force, rather than just prying back on the blade, which often results in bending it, and sometimes breaking it.

“I’d just come home from mountain biking and I thought I had an old bike bar-end, which I did,” he says. “I figured if I attached that to the trowel, in a Y, it would provide a handle that I could put my full weight on rather than just the strength of my wrist. I tried it and it worked like a charm. Rather than prying back, which we normally do with a trowel, I could apply my weight and then turn the trowel in the ground.”

Thus, in rudimentary form, was born the ergonomic Y-Grip Garden Tool.

“No sooner was that done that I wondered if it would be a marketable item,” he says. “I knew improvements were needed on the prototype, but with some refinements it might prove to be just the thing for other gardeners.”

He sent along his prototype to Lee Valley Tools—a large national distributor and merchandiser of tools of all types—and inquired if they felt there would be a market for the item.

“They suggested there was no market for such a thing,” Carr says. “But, I wasn’t disheartened. I just decided I would set out on my own and refine what I had. That was eight years ago.”

Rather than being random about the thing, Carr decided to meticulously follow the rules of marketing, since he knew if the Y-Grip was actually going to fly in the marketplace, he had to have done his homework in terms of patenting, developing a business plan and being realistic about his now pet project.

“The hardest bit of information for me to swallow is that 90 per cent of new products on the market are destined to fail, and there are so many ways a project can fail,” he says. “I was determined to avoid the pitfalls. And I can honestly say that to have gotten his far is a success.”

In that context, he says, the venture has paid off sufficiently that Carr and his wife, Bonnie, will come out of it breaking even.

Now that he has an inventory of 10,000 Y-Grips to release to the public, Carr says that marketing hasn’t always been an easy road, but it’s getting there. The Y-Grip is currently available in approximately two dozen garden shops from the Comox Valley to Regina. And a brief story in the Times-Colonist last spring gave the product the sort of exposure they needed to get the item moving.

The product you’ll find on the market today is slightly different from—and much better than—the prototype. Carr initially tried an aluminum blade with a plastic handle covering a steel core. But the aluminum wasn’t strong enough for the tasks demanded, and the steel core handle was too hard on the hands.