Duane Dearcorn was standing on a stepladder in his backyard, attempting to trim trees, when an idea struck.

The ladder kept moving because of wet grass and soft dirt, making it unstable. It eventually led to Dearcorn creating stabilizing pads for the bottom, equally distributing the weight to keep the ladder from moving.

“It works really well,” he said. “You add these pads on the bottom, and even on solid ground, inside a garage or inside your house, on carpet or on hardwood floor, the stability of it is just so much more to carry your weight.”

Dearcorn said the earliest stages of the idea began while he was working in construction, where he became interested in the physics of stabilizing heavy equipment through weight distribution.

“When we would drive equipment across something wet, you only had four points bearing all the weight of the machine,” he said. “They would crawl right across the top of it without sinking in and that intrigued me.”

It was made possible because of the weight distribution per square inch, which Dearcorn translated to his own product. 

“If the pads are 10 inches, that’s 25 pounds per square inch,” he said. “So for a 250 pound person on a ladder it would be 1.25 pounds per square inch.”

Creating the product didn’t take much time, because Dearcorn knew the design he wanted. After finding the pieces he needed to put something together, he created some prototypes. When he tested the stabilizing pads he discovered the ladder didn’t move and he was able to reach out much farther to trim trees then he could before.

“I feel real comfortable climbing up my stepladders with these on,” he said. “Then you can take them off and store them on the legs, so the legs go back together and you can hang the ladder back up on the wall.”

With so many ladders out there — more than 45 million total ladders are sold annually across both domestic and commercial sectors — Dearcorn feels there would be a market for the product.

“I’ve talked to the guys here in town at the lumber yards, and they like the idea and would sell it if they could get their hands on it,” he said. 

He also thinks the product would reduce injuries. According to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, every year 500,000 people are treated for ladder-related injuries. Approximately 300 of these incidents prove to be fatal. Sixty percent of ladder accidents occur in domestic settings, with 50% of nonfatal injuries happening at heights below 10 feet.

“You know, there’s quite a few stepladder accidents in the nation, even in our own community,” he said. “You lean out and they sink in or they fall over.”

Dearcorn eventually decided to look into patenting his product. He used InventHelp, a company which provides invention services for everyday inventors to help them in a variety of ways including prototype modeling services, invention websites and patent referral services. 

He started the process in 2019. InventHelp connected him with a patent attorney and also researched to make sure the product wasn’t already available. Finally he was ready to file for a design patent, but that proved challenging as it was the height of Covid. It took a few years but the patent was finally issued in 2024.

Now, he’s trying to determine the next step. He’s talking to businesses around Powell who would be interested in selling it if it was in production. However, with so little manufacturing done in the U.S., Dearcorn is hoping to license it or sell the patent outright if he can find someone willing to handle the cost of startup. 

“I want somebody else to build this thing,” he said. “If I can get it out in front of people to see what’s going on with it, there might be some interest from somebody that has the capabilities to get it made.”