Q&A: American Inventor Judge Mary Lou Quinlan
Entrepreneur.com

Marketing expert Mary Lou Quinlan shares the marketing secrets of successful products, plus why it's important to share your tale of passion to your consumers.
May 05, 2006
By Sarah Pierce

Were there any products, even if they didn't make it
to the final round, that immediately stood out to you as being very
marketable?

Mary Lou Quinlin: Yeah, and in fact there were a couple that we voted
for very strongly and then the inventor decided not to go forward for
their own business reasons. So there were some [inventions] the
television audience never saw that were terrific. There were two young
women who were lawyers who had invented a tight-fitting t-shirt where
a women could chart her breast self-exams. So not only could [the
t-shirt] make life better and save lives, but it gave women the
confidence they ought to have in terms of their own healthcare. That's
an example of something I thought was tremendous, but they decided [to
pull out] because this is the first year out and the requirements of
the show were too strict for some people.

I [also] really felt that Mark Major, who invented dental floss [that
quadriplegics could use], had a lot of potential. And it was
unfortunate that we couldn't get all four judges to agree. We tried to
be as unanimous as possible when it came to the [final] 12 inventors