The Jam Kat Anthology,
from the President and founder, Patrick Swartz

This odyssey began back in the early 90’s.
As an amateur song-writer and guitar player, it was annoying to set a pick down to write, retrieve pick and play, set it down to play finger-style, retrieve the pick for a melody (or thrash power chords), set it down to erase, etc.

I had a rusty old thumb pick I rarely used, and, always looking for a distraction to put off recording, it occurred to me that if I turned it sideways, slid it halfway up my forefinger, and mounted a spring-loaded arm that held a pick, I could grab the pick with my thumb when I needed it and release it when I didn’t (of course it just flashed as an image, no verbiage).

As a professional model-builder, I had a plethora of parts and materials on hand. Several hours later, I had the origin of the species. It worked fairly well, and became a staple for me when I played.

Just as the guitars I built and the songs I wrote, they were for me and the fun of it.
Years passed, as they do when you are 20-something and 30-something with children. The advent of personal computers, CAD, the Internet, CNC machining- exciting times for the product development industry- brought a bevy of interesting projects and a rich work experience. It wasn’t until I was able to search the United States Patent and Trademark Office online database that I seriously considered a market-grade pick-holster. There were numerous patents, but there wasn’t anything like my gimbaled gizmo.

Y2K saw my sister Lisa turn her metal-smithing degree into Krikawa Jewelry Designs, Inc.. Well, isn’t that convenient! Technical advances, KJD’s growth and success, as well as Lisa’s husband John (my best bud) joining her full-time CAD modeling her brilliant designs, justified the acquisition of a 3-D wax printer. I abandoned the cobbled prototypes and designed from scratch for precious metal casting.

The resulting prototype worked very well; however, there were a couple drawbacks:

John created some beautiful renderings, another burgeoning forte, but I didn’t have a solution for anything except a completely custom market. Still, the renderings were so beautiful, and it really did work. I bought ‘Patent It Yourself’ (I can see it from here- still haven’t read it).

I look for signs- coincidence, paradox, chance encounters. The ‘random’ flotsam of circumstance is just a friendly game of Scrabble (I’m not good at Scrabble; it’s acknowledging the game aspect that reveals the codec).  And it works for me- the litmus test.  

2007 provided two significant pieces of the puzzle. The first was a design contract for a plastic injected product- I learned what I needed to know about designing for plastic, and immediately bent that new ability to a revised pick-holster. Going ‘back to the drawing board’, the current single hinge and harness idea came almost immediately. The new criteria to be able to ‘share’ the pick-holster with the guitarist community came into view:

The advent of stereo lithography and other 3-D rapid-prototyping technologies allowed prototypes to be ‘printed’ without the significant cost of plastic injection tooling. I was back in the saddle, working on design iterations one after another.
The second piece came as a major epiphany, when my new friend and hockey teammate Jon Velasco (whom I had known for a year or so) informed me that he is a patent attorney. Hello!

2008 brought a marked turndown in the R&D industry, my bread and butter, and with it financial hardship. The upside was that I had more and more time to devote to the pick-holster and patent. I put everything I had into it, and a team began to form around the project. And here we are!