Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Hill.
Lauren, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I never set out to become an inventor or start a company. Medical Inflatable Exhibits started with a problem I was trying to solve while working in marketing and events for a hospital in Houston.
Part of my job was organizing community health fairs, and I noticed that people would walk right past our tables, even when we were trying to share really important information about heart disease. Around Valentine’s Day, I tried something different and hired someone to wear a giant heart costume. Suddenly, people stopped. They took pictures, started conversations and became interested in what we were trying to teach them.
That was my lightbulb moment: health education needed to be big enough and interesting enough to make people stop.
I started searching for a “giant heart” and discovered the enormous walk-through heart at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I called and asked if I could bring it to Houston, only to learn that it weighed several tons and had been there for decades.
That’s when I thought: What if I could create a giant anatomical heart that was portable?
I found a custom inflatable manufacturer and worked with a cardiologist to develop a walk-through heart that allowed visitors to follow the flow of blood through the chambers. That became the MEGA Heart, led to several patents and ultimately became the foundation for Medical Inflatable Exhibits.
Since then, we’ve expanded the concept to other parts of the human body and worked with hospitals, schools, museums and health organizations to turn health education into something people can actually experience.
Building the company hasn’t always been easy. Early on, my concept was copied by a competitor, which forced me to become a better business owner. I learned that being the inventor wasn’t enough. I had to build relationships, continually improve our products and create a reputation for taking care of our customers.
That’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned as an entrepreneur: great businesses often start by noticing a problem everyone else has accepted and asking, “Is there a better way to do this?”
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The journey hasn’t always been easy.
A few years after starting the company, when I was about seven months pregnant with my first child, I learned that someone I knew was creating a competing inflatable heart exhibit.
It was a family friend whom I had proudly told about my business the year before.
I was devastated.
My company was still young, I was preparing to become a mother, and suddenly I had a direct competitor offering something based on the concept I had created.
Fortunately, my father had encouraged me early on to patent the MEGA Heart. He recognized that what I had created was unusual and worth protecting.
But patents take time.
For several years, I had to compete while those patents made their way through the process. My competitors later challenged the patents and tried to have them invalidated. Those challenges were unsuccessful, reinforcing the strength of our intellectual property.
Eventually, circumstances came full circle. After years of fierce competition and intellectual-property disputes, the competing company ultimately declared bankruptcy, and I was able to acquire its assets for pennies on the dollar.
It was certainly vindicating, but the most important thing that came out of that period wasn’t eliminating a competitor.
It was learning how to compete.
Being copied forced me to become better.
I couldn’t rely on being the person who had the idea first. I had to build a company people wanted to work with.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Medical Inflatable Exhibits creates large-scale, walk-through anatomical exhibits that transform health and science education into an experience. Our exhibits allow people to literally step inside the human body—walking through the heart, brain, lungs and other anatomy while learning about how the body works, disease prevention and important health conditions.
We work with hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, schools, universities, museums, public health organizations and other organizations that want to engage and educate their communities in a memorable way. Our exhibits can travel almost anywhere, which allows us to bring the type of immersive educational experience you might expect to find in a major science museum directly into local communities.
What sets us apart is that education comes first. These aren’t inflatables created simply for entertainment or visual impact. We combine medical accuracy, thoughtful educational design and experiential learning with the attention-grabbing scale of our exhibits. We want someone to see a MEGA exhibit from across a room and think, “I have to go see what that is,” and then walk away having learned something meaningful about their health.
I’m especially proud that we’ve built a brand known for innovation, quality and trust. We created the original patented walk-through MEGA Heart and have continued developing new ways to make complicated health topics easier to understand and more engaging.
But what I’m most proud of is the impact. A child in a small community may never have the opportunity to visit a major science museum, but we can bring that experience to their school. A hospital can use an exhibit to start conversations about prevention. A health organization can take a complicated disease and turn it into something people can actually see, experience and understand.
At its core, Medical Inflatable Exhibits is about making health education impossible to walk past—and memorable enough to make a difference.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
My biggest advice is to test your idea before investing heavily in it. It’s easy to fall in love with something you’ve created, and friends and family may tell you it’s a great idea, but the real test is whether someone is actually willing to pay for it.
Find potential customers, show them what you’re creating and listen carefully to their feedback. Even better, get someone to pay for it before you go into mass production. Your first version doesn’t have to be perfect. Get it into the hands of real customers, learn what they like and don’t like, and continue to iterate along the way.
A great idea is only the beginning. If you can’t find someone willing to pay for it, it’s going to be very difficult to turn that idea into a sustainable business.
And don’t wait for perfection. Some of the most valuable information you’ll ever get about your business comes after you put something into the market and discover what your customers actually want—not what you assumed they wanted.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Medicalinflatables.com
- Instagram: @megainflatables
- Facebook: @medicalinflatables
- Twitter: @megaInflatables
- Youtube: @medicalinflatables
