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In Nicaragua, Nancy Tedeschi’s mother, Leatha Farrell, was busy improving the lives of the less fortunate. “My mother,” Nancy explained, “was 73 at the time. Her glasses broke and she needed a quick fix, so she took her dangling turquoise earring out and used the wire to hold them together. ” Nancy, who owned a title company, didn’t know the first thing about manufacturing. She spent hours at a conference table with her staff, removing the tiny screws that hold together glasses and then adding in an even smaller washer which would secure beautiful crystals and pearls.

And that’s when Nancy had a light bulb moment. Millions of people wear glasses and just as many have spent hours trying to fix them. If she could re-invent the screw by adding a long snap off piece, which would allow the average person to fix their glasses in 30 seconds -- that would be the real money maker and just the charm she was looking for.

So she put away her pretty crystals and took her idea to a manufacturer who’d been making tiny screws for the optical industry for decades. “He was blown away! It was such a simple solution for such a common problem. And there was a huge hole in the market.” Without another thought, Nancy went into production -- and manufactured 10,000 screws, which she named the SnapIt Screw. Three days later, her phone was ringing.

“I got a call from an optician and he said he’d been trying to invent a tool that would make fixing eye glasses simpler for more than 35 years, but it never occurred to him to invent a new screw! He called his sales rep, who took it to the president of an optical distributor and five months later, they were selling my screw to opticians around the country.”That partnership would eventually turn into a seven-figure licensing deal and an Award of Excellence from the American Optical Laboratories Association. But that was just the beginning. Once Nancy had the SnapIt Screw in the hands of opticians, her next step was to put her new product on store shelves. Slowly but surely, Nancy made her way into stores like Office Depot and Ace Hardware.

And Nancy’s persistence paid off. In the coming months, the SnapIt Screw will be on the shelves of Walmart stores nationwide. Now she’s talking with automotive and technology companies about adapting the SnapIt screw for industrial use -- and she’s in discussions with the government about ways to put her kits into the hands of men and women in the military. “The most important thing I can say is, don’t listen to people who say it can’t be done. There were plenty of people who called me the crazy screw lady. Well, I’m not so crazy now, am I?”