Study Buddy A mother’s vision pays off in a marketable product and her daughter’s grades

Kids do it. Their parents do it. Even grandparents do it.

They sit at the breakfast table and read cereal boxes. Even youngsters who can’t read stare at it. And that is what inspired a Hermon woman’s invention of the Study Buddy.

Diane Zegarra, a former youth pastor at a Bangor church, invented the study aid four years ago to help her daughter learn to read. She was to begin demonstrating and selling the Study Buddy at the Airport Mall this week.

The Study Buddy is a tote bag a little larger than a cereal box. It has an 81/2-by-10-inch pocket of clear vinyl into which homework sheets or coloring books can be inserted. It also has other pockets for things like erasable markers. Workbooks, textbooks, magazines and coloring books can be carried inside the Study Buddy. The tote bag retails for $19.95.

“My daughter was 7 years old at the time, going to a private Christian school, and she was very slow in her reading class,” said Zegarra, as her daughter Christina, now 11, demonstrated the product at the kitchen table. “She was really discouraged with school to the point where she wanted me to home school her. So I just prayed and I asked the Lord to give me an idea.”

Her prayer was answered in a dream. She saw a big, thick book with pages turning and drawings on the pages, but it was not the Study Buddy. That would come to her two weeks later in a vision.

“I was praying about 5 o’clock in the morning and this idea flashed through my head,” she said. “I saw my daughter sitting at the kitchen table, staring at a cereal box.”

But, in Zegarra’s vision the cereal box was not like any she had ever placed on her kitchen table. It was inside a beautiful cover that held her daughter’s school papers. And in the vision Christina was blissfully reading not the back of the cereal box but rather her homework, which had been tucked inside a clear cover outside the box.

Zegarra, who doesn’t sew, told her hairdresser about the idea. She offered to make the first prototype out of a pair of old blue jeans and clear polyvinyl. Christina was so excited by the box cover that she spent every morning at breakfast working on her homework, said the girl’s mother. Soon, she was reading at grade level.

To pay for patent fees and prototypes, the family sold their car and van. Manufacturing the Study Buddy in the United States proved too costly, so Zegarra went to Lima, Peru, her husband, Raul’s, native city. She estimated that the family had invested more than $30,000 in the invention.

Although she received her patent late last year, marketing the Study Buddy proved difficult. Zegarra tried selling the product through specialty stores in Bangor, but no one was buying. People have to see how the Study Buddy is used, she said.

“This is a demonstrated product,” said the inventor. “It doesn’t sell on the shelf. I’ve marketed it personally in homes and sold some through word of mouth. I had a booth at a home-schooling convention and sold 10 to a grandmother at a campground. She bought one for each of her grandkids.”

About the time the U.S. Patent Office was issuing her patent, Zegarra was dealt a double blow. She and her husband were laid off from their jobs as youth ministers at Abundant Life Church and a man she’d approached about a licensing deal to market the Study Buddy reneged, according to Zegarra.

“I had patent pending but he copied my whole invention,” she said. “When I found that out, I just cried.”

She said last week that she’s considering taking legal action, but does not have enough money for legal fees. Financially, the past year has been difficult for the couple. For a while, she was selling homemade pastries to office workers in nearby Bangor to make ends meet.

That’s all irrelevant, however, to her children, who are the real experts on the Study Buddy.

“I use this for my math ‘cuz it’s really hard for me,” said Christina Zegarra, demonstrating her tote at the kitchen table. The 11-year-old slipped a paper full of multiplication problems in the clear vinyl pocket of her Study Buddy. Using an erasable marker, she wrote the answers on the vinyl. When she made a mistake, Christina used a damp paper towel to erase it, then wrote down the correct answer.

“I do it here first, then I take my math paper out and copy it. It’s much easier to erase on the Study Buddy and the paper doesn’t tear when I erase,” she said.

Ten-year-old Krystle McLaughlin said that if she forgets to do her homework after school, the Study Buddy makes it easier for her to do at breakfast. She often uses a Study Buddy when she comes to the Zegarra’s to visit her best friend Christina.

The girls also use it for tic-tac-toe games and to stay busy on long car rides. But, adults have found other uses for the tote bag, according to Zegarra. A neighbor uses it for her cross-stitch work and is grateful she no longer is constantly marking up her pattern, but can use the erasable pouch instead.

Sylvia Pomroy, owner of Sylvia’s Resale Shop in Brewer, sent two Study Buddies to her granddaughters in Florida. They were a big hit with the 6- and 8-year-olds, she said.

“They’re real handy because everything fits in there. It’s real compact with places for crayons, books and scissors,” said Pomroy. “Every time they go somewhere, like to a restaurant, they take the Study Buddy.”

Christina, however, has a little different perspective on the product her mother invented.

“I can color the pictures I really like, like pictures of horses, over and over again with different colors,” she said.

For more information, call Zegarra at 848-3190 or visit the Web site at www.ilovemystudybuddy.com.