Stomach Grabber Polo Shirt Big Hit with Certain Men

Inventor Says Manufacturing the Shirt Similar to Making a Tire

Bobby Renfro knew he had a winning idea the moment it struck him. He was sitting on a bench inside an Omaha shopping mall as two men with large stomachs ambled past. They wore polo shirts and the shirt tails weren't long enough to hide all of their stomachs and did nothing to contain the jiggling.

"It was the old light bulb coming on," he recalled recently during an interview at his workshop in the basement of his home. "An image flicked through my mind from when I was a little boy watching my mother struggle into a girdle. Suddenly, I had it: The Stomach Grabber polo shirt. It would support the weight of a large stomach and sort of smooth it and contain it."

That was five years and a patent and a trademark or two ago. Today, Renfro's Stomach Grabber polo is becoming a staple at such outlets as Land's End, Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean and, recently, the customer of all customers for an inventor and entrepreneur: Wal-Mart.

"They're doing very well," a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart said from the company's Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters. "Those of our customers who might need it seem to really like the shirt."

Renfro's Stomach Grabber came along just at the right time. Health experts say two thirds of Americans are now overweight and some 20 percent can be classed a obese or nearly so.

Recently, the head of the Centers for Disease Control warned that overweight is emerging as the nation's No. 1 health problem. The Senate passed legislation that would create a federal program of grants to schools for health classes and other programs to combat overweight among children.

It would seem that Renfro has struck the entrepreneur's Mother Lode.

"Yeah, I thought that at first," he grumbled. "Then the imitators began to appear. Just one at first. Then another and another. Now it's a plague."

Though Renfro has a patent on his Stomach Grabber design and manufacturing approach, plus trademarks for variations on the name, it hasn't kept the copycats at bay. He is now pursuing three patent infringement lawsuits and has a phalanx of trademark experts writing letters, threatening lawsuits and otherwise trying to keep the Stomach Grabber logo and name free from taint.

Renfro's problem is that while he has a patent, there apparently are other approaches to constructing a polo shirt so that it hugs, firms and lifts a large stomach. Or, as Renfro presents it, the others claim to have found alternatives. "That's what imitators do. They imitate," he said.

Stomach Grabbers come in the usual polo shirt sizes for men. However, borrowing from women's bra sizing, each size also has three "pouch" variations based on stomach volume, A, B and C.

"It looks like there's enough demand that we'll soon add a D pouch," he said.

Renfro won't disclose the details of how his shirts are constructed, except that it involves rubber, tiny threads of a high tech titanium-vanadium alloy and a rubber vulcanization process not unlike that used to make automobile tires.

"I know. You can skip the spare tire jokes, " he said during a tour of his workshop. He was wearing the newly licensed Burberrys' $129.95 edition of the Stomach Grabber, pouch size B. No jiggling was evident as he led his visitor around, agilely ducking around furnace ducts and racks filled with pipes, bolts of cloth and several large Stomach Grabber Halloween costumes.

"This is our new line," he said holding up a Saddam Hussein Stomach Grabber costume. "It's a big item with adults who like to go trick or treating on their own carrying a five-gallon bucket."

Merchandisers have discovered that most of their male customers are so self conscious that they go into dressing rooms with the Stomach Grabber polos hidden under other clothes.

"At first we thought we had shoplifting going on," said a manager at an Omaha Wal-Mart. "Then we realized it was a male embarrassment problem, something like buying condoms."

The solution was to add a separate bank of dressing rooms near the Stomach Grabber display and provide special Stomach Grabber bags that pass through the checkout without the cashier actually displaying the garment for other customers to see and, apparently, snicker at.

"Sales really moved up after that," the Wal-Mart manager said.

Renfro said many of the outlets selling the Stomach Grabber have signed on to a cooperative advertising campaign that will attempt to make buying a Stomach Grabber an "in" thing, rather than something to hide.

The campaign will feature the slogan: "What"s in Your Pouch?"

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