Imagine an early morning in Beverly Hills, California. It’s 2009, and this neighborhood that Hollywood loves so much is starting to wake up. The gyms are filled with celebrities working up a sweat for the first time that day. Local stores are selling fresh juices and lattes that cost a lot more than they should.
Not far away, in a small office on North Bedford Drive that’s kind of hidden, two men have been up for hours. They’re trying really hard to make an invention perfect. This invention would end up changing the way cosmetic surgery is done.
These two men make an unlikely pair. Usually, side jobs are for people who are still trying to make a name for themselves in the world. But Dr. Gregory Mueller and Ted Gagliano had already achieved a lot.
In the first year that Mueller was practicing, he went from renting a room to buying a house right in Beverly Hills. Gagliano has an impressive Hollywood resume. He worked as a supervisor of post-production on movies like “Titanic” and “Star Wars.” (There’s even a framed picture of him with Steven Spielberg in his living room.)
But Gagliano and Mueller had a strange thing they were really interested in: the neck.
Over the next ten years and more, they spent millions of dollars dealing with the FDA. They were the first to use virtual reality in healthcare. And they made a surgery that was usually only for people in Hollywood available to regular people.
Then, they almost closed everything down. But then, the thing they thought would ruin their business actually made it more popular than ever.
Celebrities like Kris Jenner, Courtney Love, and Sharon Osbourne are just some of the big names in Hollywood who are said to have gotten neck lifts. Experts say that a neck lift can get rid of fat in an area of the body that often doesn’t change much, even if you exercise. Mueller, as a surgeon in Los Angeles, did a lot of neck lifts. But his patients would complain that the surgery was too invasive. It meant cutting open the neck, using general anesthesia, and having a long time to recover after the surgery. Even worse, sometimes patients had to get a touch-up procedure ten years later.
It was a big surgery that cost a lot of money.
And if you weren’t an actress or a model, most people didn’t want to deal with all the trouble of getting a traditional neck lift.
One day, while driving to San Diego for a conference, Mueller couldn’t stop thinking about something. He wondered: What if there was a way to do a neck lift without having to cut open the neck?
It was a pretty unusual thought. For a plastic surgeon, the way to make money is simple: the more time you spend in the operating room, the more money you earn. Even his own brother warned him about the cost of spending time on this side project.
But Mueller was different. When he was 11 years old, he fixed his parents’ washing machine so it would signal when a load was done. He would have patented the idea if his father hadn’t said no to the $1,000 investment.
During medical school, Mueller had his own wood-working shop. His mother was so worried he’d cut off a finger that she encouraged him to go into plastic surgery. That way, he could still work with his hands, but without the danger of a saw.
After trying out different ideas to improve the neck procedure, he came up with a prototype. He attached a light to the end of a threading rod with a suture. Then, he could tell how deep he was under the skin by looking at how bright the light was. If the light faded, it meant he was too deep, close to the arteries. If it had an amber glow, it meant he could safely sew the neck muscles without cutting the neck open.
He was onto something good. But there was a problem: he didn’t know what to do next.
It’s not very likely that your next door neighbor is a patent lawyer. But then again, you probably don’t live in Beverly Hills.
One day, while Mueller was taking out the trash, he casually mentioned his side project. When his neighbor, who was a patent lawyer, asked if he had filed a patent yet, Mueller said no. His neighbor was really shocked.
Then, when Mueller told him that he was also working with a biomedical engineer who hadn’t signed any kind of non-disclosure agreement (NDA), his neighbor quickly made an appointment for him with his law firm the very next day.
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