New Canaan Entrepreneur Working to Get Innovative Hand Truck on the Market

When Kurt Feick was a kid in New Canaan recovering from a sports injury that left his leg in a cast for six months, he took up sculpture at the Silvermine Arts Guild and became comfortable with designing and shaping metal objects.

That may have paved the way for his being attracted to another kind of project: Much later, as a trader with a Greenwich hedge fund, he ran into an old friend looking for financing to market an invention (an innovative nut and a bolt). He fell in love with the process and later left his career in finance to take up entrepreneurship full-time.

Now Feick runs his own business getting inventions to market. He’s marketed an innovative wheelbarrow in the past, and now he’s got an innovative hand truck that he’s been testing and modifying to try to improve on it a bit. He’s also flying off to Mexico and China, negotiating deals to get it manufactured on a mass scale and find potential customers for it.

After quitting his job and working on the nut-and-bolt project, Feick was licensing a variety of devices to get them to market. One recent device was a disc brake for a wheelbarrow. It sells well in Europe, but hasn’t caught on in the United States, and now he’s working on a newer version. Feick says his company’s sales are between $2 million and $3 million a year.

He’s concentrating a lot of his energy now on an innovative hand truck. He’s worked with the inventors, who received a patent on it in 2013 and approached him to try to get it to market.

“I took a look at their website, and I knew, right away, this is going to be something special,” he said.

What’s so great about this hand truck? Feick says it can be operated in a smoother, easier, safer way than hand trucks now on the market. It can even allow someone to carry larger loads than that person would with a typical hand truck.

The hand truck has a second set of wheels between the first set and the person using the truck. They’re essentially set up on a hinge that allows the user to move them in toward the back of the truck or out toward the user. When moved out, the truck can stand on four wheels, and it doesn’t have to be tipped up to park it somewhere or tipped back again to move it. (It’s easier to see in the first seconds of the video at the bottom of this article.)

When Feick arranged a kind of test run for several hand trucks at UPS, the drivers found they could put a couple more boxes — carrying eight on a run instead of the six they’d been carrying, a potential boost to their productivity while using a device less likely to cause an accident.

UPS, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, beer manufacturers — and in fact any company that’s in the business of sending delivery trucks out to deliver products or packages — is a potential customer for a product that could mean fewer injuries, fewer broken products and more items delivered with each hand-truck load, Feick said.

Feick, 60, owns and runs Beagle Tools, which has a very small number of employees in China. “Otherwise, it’s mostly contractors,” including sales people, he said.

He works out of his New Canaan home — when he’s at home. He estimates that he travels 250 days of the year, often to Mexico, China or Europe.

Feick grew up in New Canaan, attending public schools, St. Luke’s School and then going off to Salisbury School and Hampshire College. He’s not married now, but New Canaan was where his own two children were raised — a daughter who works for Christian Dior in Paris and a son with IBM in Toronto.

He’s currently discussing financing for the hand cart with venture capital investors and expects to get the device to market this summer.

Feick said he’s never regretted getting out of the finance industry and into the business he’s in now. “If you’re not having fun in your business,” he said, “you’re in the wrong business.”