Michael Muniz: Innovation in Camping Comfort

I’m a handyman out here in Austin, Texas. Ever since I was a kid. They, my friends always call me Macgyver because I was always fixing stuff and It just fell in line with my creativity and my hands on, you know, from being a kid working on bicycles. Go carts. I created this sleeping bag because I had a ingrown toenail that would bug the crap out of me every time I went to sleep. The way to the comforters would just irritate my toes to no end. And when you go camping, or we go camping regular sleeping bags that we had.

They do not have an expansion area for your feet. You have to force the bag to conform to your feet. and after you’ve been hiking all day on your feet all day, you go lay down in your sleeping bag. The last thing you want is that irritation on me, my ingrown toenail. So I thought about it. I said,  I could build a better mousetrap, and. as it were, and I created this sleeping bag that it’s like a tent for your feet. At the fore end, at the foot end of the sleeping bag has an expanded area. So when you lay down, you’re not forcing the bag to conform to your feet, it has an extra space there for your feet to stick straight up. Unlike my mother in law, who’s sleeps hanging from the rafters. Most of us sleep on her back with her toes sticking up.

So I did a couple of prototypes of the bag and sourced it out to different manufacturers. See who could come up with the proper design that I created, and finally found a manufacturer that got it to my specs. And yeah, had it mass produced and shipped them out to Amazon. They landed in November of last year to Amazon, but unfortunately, that same month we found out that my wife had a stage, 3 breast cancer and kind of through a loop in or wrench in the works. Kind of put things on on hold until someone from Boom America reached out to me and asked, you know they were excited about the product. Asked me if I’d be interested in coming on their show and I did, and since then, you know, they’ve given me several pointers. I you know I’m a handyman. Nuts and bolts. I can fix things. Take a motor part. Put it back together, make make it run.

But as far as social media, the digital marketing and stuff I don’t have that that’s not in my wheelhouse. So they have been a great help in pairing me with people such as yourself, who can broaden my understanding to the social media, to the digital marketing aspect of an online, you know, retail business like this. So that’s where I’m at right now.