From Lego Pile to 7 Patents: The Lay-n-Go Story

In 2010, Adam Fazackerley was a web developer and IT professional. He had no background in manufacturing, product design, supply chain, or intellectual property law. Today he is the COO of a company that holds 7 US utility patents on a mechanism used in products sold to hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. This is what the middle looked like.

The idea came from the floor

My wife Amy spotted the problem first. Three boys, a house full of Legos, and no good system for cleanup. She had the idea: what if the play surface was the bag? Lay it flat to build on, pull the drawstring to clean up.

It was obvious once she said it. We looked everywhere for something that worked that way. Nothing existed.

So we decided to build it.

I want to be clear about what "we decided to build it" meant for two people with no product background. It meant figuring out every single step from scratch. The mechanism. The materials. The manufacturing. The intellectual property. The business. All of it, one phone call and one mistake at a time.

What a web developer brings to a physical product company

Not as much as you'd hope, and more than you'd think.

The technical thinking transferred. Breaking a complex problem into components, understanding systems, debugging when something doesn't work the way it should — those skills apply to product development even when the product is physical rather than digital.

What didn't transfer: everything about the physical world. Supply chains. Material sourcing. Manufacturing tolerances. Import logistics. Patent prosecution. Retail buyers. None of that existed in my background. I learned all of it after the fact, usually by doing it wrong first.

The patent process: what we didn't know

We didn't know what a utility patent was when we started. We knew patents existed in a general sense. We didn't know the difference between a utility patent and a design patent, what made something patentable, what "prior art" meant, or how long the process took.

Here's what we learned:

A utility patent protects how something works, not just how it looks. A design patent protects appearance. What we had was a mechanism — the specific way the bag lays flat, holds its shape, and cinches closed. That's a utility patent. It's harder to get and more valuable to hold.

The claims are everything. A patent is only as strong as its claims — the specific, precise statements of what is protected. Writing claims is an art. A good patent attorney earns their fee entirely in how they draft the claims. Too narrow and competitors work around you easily. Too broad and the patent gets rejected or invalidated.

It takes longer than you expect. From first filing to granted patent: one to two years, sometimes more. During that time you're operating with a "patent pending" status that provides some protection but not the full weight of a granted patent.

You file multiple patents for the same core idea. We now hold 7 US utility patents on the layflat-to-drawstring mechanism. That's not 7 different inventions — it's 7 different claims on the same core idea, each protecting a different aspect, application, or improvement. Building a patent portfolio is a strategy, not a one-time event.

The hardest parts — all of them

People ask which part was hardest. The honest answer is all of it, in sequence.

Filing the first patent was hard because we didn't know what we were doing. Finding a patent attorney we trusted, understanding the process, learning the language of IP law — all of that had a steep learning curve.

Finding a manufacturer was hard because we had no relationships, no leverage, and no experience evaluating whether a factory could actually deliver what they promised. We made expensive mistakes.

Getting to market was hard because having a product and having a business are completely different things. Website, photography, packaging, pricing, distribution, customer service — each one is its own discipline.

Balancing it with family was hard in ways that don't show up in a business case study. We were building a company while raising three boys. There is no clean separation between those two things. They bleed into each other constantly. You make it work because you have to.

I don't say all of this to be discouraging. I say it because every version of the entrepreneurship story that skips the hard parts does a disservice to anyone who is in the middle of their own hard part wondering if they're doing it wrong.

You're probably not doing it wrong. It's just hard.

What 7 patents actually means for a small business

It means we can defend what we built.

When a large company notices a small company's product and decides to make their own version, the small company usually loses. They don't have the legal budget, the manufacturing scale, or the distribution relationships to compete.

Patents change that equation. Not perfectly, and not cheaply — patent litigation is expensive even when you're right. But a portfolio of 7 US utility patents on a core mechanism is a credible deterrent. It's documentation that we were here first, that we did the work to protect it, and that copying it has a cost.

For a small business, that's worth every penny of the filing fees.

What I'd tell someone starting now

Talk to a patent attorney before you build anything. Not after you have a prototype. Before. Understanding what's protectable shapes how you design the product.

File a provisional patent application early. It establishes your priority date for 12 months at a lower cost than a full application. It buys you time to refine.

Build the patent portfolio intentionally. Each granted patent should cover a different angle of protection. Think about it as a fence, not a single lock.

Expect the process to take years, not months. Plan your business timeline accordingly.

Find people who have done it before. We learned more from conversations with other small business founders who had navigated IP than from any book or article. Those conversations are worth seeking out.

Eleven years later

We started with a Lego cleanup mat and a kitchen table. We now make organizers for travelers, parents, first responders, pet owners, makeup enthusiasts, and anyone who has ever said they can never find anything in their bag.

Seven patents. Hundreds of thousands of customers. A product that genuinely solves a problem people have every day.

It took longer than we expected, cost more than we budgeted, and was harder than we imagined. It was worth all of it.

Adam Fazackerley is the COO and Co-Founder of Lay-n-Go, LLC. He founded the company in 2010 with his wife Amy. Shop the full collection at layngo.com.

Updated May 2026.