Northwest Indiana is packed with innovative entrepreneurs, many with unique inventions they are looking to bring to consumers around the country. For more than 30 years, Hartman Global Intellectual Property (IP) Law has worked with these pioneers to help protect their rights as they navigate the market.
One of those pioneers is Mont Handley, who is well known for his appearance on “Shark Tank” in 2015. On the show, he convinced Mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary, and Robert Herjavec to invest in PitMoss, a potting mix made from recycled paper products. It was a product he had been developing for two decades, and he’d consulted with Gary and Domenica Hartman, owners of and IP attorneys at Hartman Global, for years. When he first came up with the idea, he was working at a retail nursery in the Region and had an admittedly shoestring budget.
“At the time the Hartmans were still just getting started as well, they were practicing out of their home and had a couple of little kids,” Handley said. “I met with Gary and they helped me file and get my patent. Working retail, I was sort of broke at the time, and just paid them maybe $25 a week for their service fee. I don’t know how a young couple starting out a legal practice managed it.”
The relationship blossomed, and Handley has relied on Hartman Global ever since. Following the success of PitMoss, he took a job in the Pittsburgh tourism office as a national sales director. Outside of his office duties, he spent time visiting different Pennsylvania greenhouses and nurseries in order to market PitMoss. During the trips, he found a recurring problem – lack of labor.
“The first thing I remember noticing was that many of these multimillion dollar agribusinesses were being run by elderly people,” he said. “We’d hear over and over again that nobody in their family really wanted to take it over because the work was too hard and profits weren’t what they used to be. They’d say ‘when we’re done, the business is done.’ That just felt like such a waste of knowledge.”
At the time, Handley had been doing a lot of reading about automation in manufacturing. He heard about how factories used sensors, such as RFID tags, on individual parts to track them and enable machines to ‘see’ the parts and automate different labor.
“I got the idea to put sensors in propagation pots,” he said. “That’s the best place to put one because you always start with a seed or a cutting. If that pot is tagged with a sensor, it’ll travel with that plant for its entire lifecycle. I thought the idea had to have been patented, it’s a multibillion dollar industry. I was shocked that it hadn’t.”
Handley found a business partner, Alexandra “AJ” Moran, and created Plantennas – sensor-enabled, biodegradable fiber pots embedded with RFID tags. The pots allow commercial horticulture businesses to automate large parts of plant propagation, inventory, and data collection.
“Where a factory might use a robotic arm to pack an item into a box for shipping, a greenhouse might use one to grab a plant and put it on a rolling rack to a truck that’ll deliver it to your local Wal-Mart,” Handley said. “We’re not trying to eliminate people in greenhouses, they’re already gone.”
Plantennas is continuing to grow, securing more funding and partners as it looks to help clients find new ways to automate their systems. The business is based out of Chesterton, with Handley having moved back to the Region to serve as entrepreneur-in-residence at Purdue University Northwest’s Commercialization and Manufacturing Excellence Center.
In his role as an educator, he sends many students to Hartman Global for purposes both educational and practical.
“Kids at Purdue University Northwest get to keep the IP of any project they work on,” he said. “We’ve had multiple students apply for provisional patents and we help them with that. It gives them a one year opportunity to work with Gary and Domenica on developing their claims. I tell any entrepreneur starting out, don’t be afraid to ask professionals like the Hartmans for help. They have vast experience, and if it's your first time working with IP, it’s probably their 20,000th.”
To learn more about Hartman Global IP Law and to see other success stories, visit hartmanglobal-ip.com. For more information on Plantennas and how it might transform horticulture, visit plantennas.com.
