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Taylor and Wendy Hampton
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Earl Gray
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Boredom can be a funny thing. One minute it has you climbing the walls - the next it’s helping you cash in. Just ask Wendy Hampton.
It was a slow day at the Hampton household in Lawrenceville. Swayze, a male English Bulldog, was taking a nap, snoring as usual. Fifteen year old Taylor was awake, but just as dormant. So she went to her mom and complained that she was “bored.” At her mother’s suggestion, Taylor did an internet search for family activities, a smart move on her part. Playing board games was one of the ideas that popped up.
Wendy is a credit manager for a company in Suwanee. The North Carolina native is also an inventor. It just so happens that tinkering with board game ideas is her forte. So before long Wendy and Talyor were whiling away time, laughing and cutting up, playing a game that, at the time, was known only to them. The game combines elements of charades, drawing, and verbal cues in order to guess idioms. Idioms are expressions whose meaning can’t necessarily be drawn from the actual words, such as kick the bucket, an idiom for passing away.
“When I first started creating games it was a year long process to see what was out there and where there might be a void,” Wendy said. “I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and jot ideas down.”
Wendy called her new game Shop Talk. That was before she heard a radio ad for an inventor’s casting call.
Everyday Edisons is a national talent search TV show for inventors. With Shop Talk in hand, Wendy went to the Georgia Public Broadcasting studios in Atlanta to see how her idea stacked up against over 500 other inventors. It stacked up pretty good. She was one of 14 inventors chosen to be invested in.
“I was speechless at first, “Wendy said. “Then I felt a personal sense of validation that the games I had been working on for close to three years were really good ideas.”
Once lacking the financial resources to market the game herself, Wendy now had Everyday Edisons picking up the tab. They changed the name from Shop Talk to Befudiom, a cross between befuddle and idiom. Merriam-Webster, of dictionary fame, was so impressed that they bought into the idea as well. Now, Merriam-Webster’s Befudiom can be purchased online – its one of the top 25 selling games on Amazon.com - and at some retail stores. Tentative plans are to have the game in Target and Wal-Mart stores in the near future. For her efforts, Wendy will receive annual royalty checks for 20-years, the length of the patent.
Not wanting to rest on her laurels, Wendy has been working on three new projects. This past February she was in New York at a toy fair where she got some “good feelers” from toy company executives.
“We’re all looking for the next Monopoly,” she said. A home on Park Place wouldn’t be bad, either.
Earl Gray is a freelance writer. Please send comments and suggestions to etg_3@hotmail.com.
