SUCCESSstories
Inspiring Tales of Startups,
Growth and Overcoming Hardships
Creating a New Product for an
Untapped Market
BY MAE MAÑAC AP-JOHNSON
DR. PAUL EVANS
Founder, Mammagard
Operations, LLC • Los Angeles, California
ammagard is an orthotic device designed specifically for women to help protect breasts when
laying facedown during therapeutic care or
massage treatment. When Mammagard was first developed
in Melbourne, Australia in 2011, the team had to face at least
two key challenges: how to introduce a product that no one
has ever heard of before and how to create scientific
validation that can help support claims of product efficacy.
“New products and technologies are always difficult to
establish,” says Mammagard Operations LLC founder Dr. Paul
Evans. “Creating validation for the product, scientific proof and
efficacy was very challenging. Finding engineering partners
with satisfactory plastic manufacturing to assist in the development proved to be very important.”
M
From Play-Doh to Reality
The idea for Mammagard came to Dr. Evans, an osteopath,
orthotist and prosthetist, after seeing the large untapped
market of women who may need the product, particularly
those who have undergone mastectomy, breast reconstruction
and augmentation wherein comfort and breast tissue
protection is important.
“We developed the Mammagard product range from
scratch,” says Dr. Evans. “We identified the essential need for
protecting women’s breasts in prone load-bearing activities,
particularly those with surgically altered chests. We saw the
particular benefit in massage and day spa environments where
the need is very high for premium quality comfort and
protection for many women.”
Believe it or not, Mammagard’s very first prototype was
molded out of Play-Doh. “It has grown from being conceptualized first by using Play-Doh to being a finalist in the 2015
International Good Design Awards,” he says.
Dr. Evans added that Mammagard is the first orthotic device
62
PULSE
■
May 2016
ever registered for women’s breasts. “We have grown from a small
Australian business into a U.S. entity with commercial
acceptance and sales in both plastic surgery and spa industries,”
he says.
Learning from Failure
As a t