The Snow-Ease.

• Position: Wilmarc's snow shovel

Thorntown company's valuable lesson reported by The Wall Street Journal.

"If you can push a grocery cart, you can push this thing." So says Penny Nirider, president of Wilmarc, a Thorntown-based company that manufactures the Snow-Ease snow shovel.

"The handle looks like a push mower handle and it just glides," she describes. "You walk and push and you never have to shovel. It just makes a wall around whatever you are trying to clear."

Acknowledging that eye-appeal isn't the best quality of the Snow-Ease, she adds, "You look at it and you think, 'whatever,' but until you use it, you don't realize what it can do."

Until last year, not many people did realize what the Snow-Ease could do, largely because the device had little marketing or advertising behind it. In fact, only about 500 of them had been shipped, in unassuming packaging, before Nirider became president. Now Wilmarc has shipped as many as 400 a week, and the numbers keep piling up. But Nirider can't take all the credit for the beginnings of what could be a Snow-Ease phenomenon.

Some of the credit has to go to an unnamed senior citizen from Pennsylvania, as well as a popular radio personality.

Nirider got a call just before Christmas last year from a woman who had a Snow-Ease and wanted another but couldn't find one.

Not only did Nirider agree to sell her one directly, but she charged the woman the same $19.95 wholesale price that the company was charging distributors. The woman then called a Pittsburgh radio personality, Lynn Cullen, who was complaining on the air about having her shovel stolen. On the woman's recommendation, Cullen ordered a Snow-Ease, loved it, and sang its praises on her show.

Then things snowballed.

"We came in one day and our two phones were ringing off the hook," recalls Nirider. "Our customer service person thought it was a joke because the Colts were...