When junior economics major Ryan Dickerson created the Rylaxer in the summer of 2008, he wasn’t trying to make money or even market the product to others.

Back then, Dickerson was a typical freshman feeling cramped in his Flint Hall dormitory room, uncomfortable in his bed and dissatisfied with his “crappy” wooden chair, he said.

“After sitting in that chair for a semester and trying to sit on my bed for a semester, I developed lower-back problems,” Dickerson said. “My back was always hurting, and I needed to come up with a way to make it so I didn’t have to change my lifestyle in order to be comfortable. So I changed my living environment. I just didn’t want to have to sacrifice comfort in my own home if there was a way to solve it.”

That summer, Dickerson went to work in developing the first Rylaxer: a bolster — not a pillow, as Dickerson pointed out — that is finely tuned to the human body to provide for maximum comfort. It’s a product that can turn a twin bed into a couch and support your back at the same time.

The entrepreneurial project has taken off among SU students and is gaining national recognition in business magazines. Dickerson credits the resources SU offers to entrepreneurs for his business’s growing success.

He’s currently working on two new versions of the product that he hopes will premiere this summer. He sees the prospect of students themselves customizing Rylaxers and potentially even re-selling individuals’ designs to other students.

‘That’ll hopefully be able to separate us from everyone else,” Dickerson said. “We’ve designed some really cool concepts on how we can take this from a baseline product to something that’s really extraordinary.”

The Rylaxer’s “secret sauce,” Dickerson said, is its ability to fit the user’s body. When creating the product that summer, Dickerson took everything into account, such as the most ergonomic angle for a person’s back while sitting.

Dickerson estimated that he spent 20-30 hours during the summer with a futon specialist from the Abba Upholstery, Foam, and Futons store in Gaithersburg, Md., developing the first prototype of the product.

“It’s funny, the first two that we made were never intended for profit,” Dickerson said. “We needed a solution for our own lives, so we just made the solution for (ourselves).”

Even so, students in contact with Dickerson began noticing the Rylaxer, often mistaking it for a couch. Eventually, Dickerson said, people started wanting their own.

Since then, Dickerson has sold 16 Rylaxers in all and was recognized in the March issue of Inc. Magazine, a New York-based business magazine. Inc. featured the Rylaxer and Rylaxing Company as one of nine America’s Coolest College Start-ups for 2010.

“It used to be that you end up being an entrepreneur after 10 or 15 years of working for someone else in corporate America,” said Mike Hofman, executive online editor of Inc. Magazine. “But now, with the explosion of Web-based businesses, plus with the grim job market we’ve had in the last couple of years for college graduates, we’re seeing more and more students beginning to take the entrepreneurial plunge very early, in their teens and 20s.”

The magazine featured businesses of all varieties, ranging from a textbook-renting service to a company that records funerals on CDs. Anyone can vote on the Web site for their favorite product, but Hofman said the magazine’s feature is not a contest whatsoever. The proprietor does not receive anything for “winning.”

That wasn’t a problem for Dickerson, who enjoyed the media attention he has received and the experience he’s had.

“Now it’s gone from really an incubated, very small business concept to something that could really be a profitable business, which is mind-blowing to me,” Dickerson said. “I thought this was just going to be an entertaining résumé builder.”

Currently, Dickerson is only a part-time student because the economic downturn forced him to lighten his courseload in order to save money, he said.

He credited his success to the Couri Hatchery, a program set up within the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. The Hatchery helps foster student entrepreneurship by providing the office space and the resources. Dickerson also found a mentor in Thomas Kruczek, executive director of the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship, which houses the Hatchery program.

“I can be professional here,’ Dickerson said of the Hatchery. “I have a cubicle. I have a conference room here. It makes it a little more real. And I guess that reality made me want to work harder, and it’s just gone well.”

Kruczek said although Dickerson still has plenty of work ahead of him, he has the entrepreneurial characteristics required to succeed in the business world.

“When I talk to entrepreneurs that are successful, you can usually see that passion that they cannot wait to get up in the morning to work,” Kruczek said. ‘The passion he has for his product was just so, so huge. To me, what Ryan did is what entrepreneurship is all about. He saw a problem and he found a solution to fix that problem.”

But Dickerson couldn’t have done it alone. He tapped into resources across the campus community.

“If I wasn’t at Syracuse, this would never have happened,” he said.

Although he is in the College of Arts and Sciences, Dickerson turned to the business school to pitch and plan his idea. He also utilized the College of Law to establish Rylaxing as a limited liability corporation, the College of Visual and Performing Arts to improve the product, the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to advertise and the School of Information Studies to make a Web site.

“I’d like to, through example, show the product of exactly how much this university’s capable of,” he said. “It’s all about uniting all the schools as opposed to being like, ‘We’re the No. 1 in this, we’re the No. 1 in that.’ Why can’t we just be the No. 1 in everything?”

Published on March 9, 2010 at 12:00 pm

Contact Lorne: lefulton@syr.edu