By MARTY LEVINE
Beth and Jeff Gusenoff were home one day at the family dinner table discussing what Beth’s patients need to be able to walk around normally after foot surgery or other foot treatments. Beth is a podiatrist, and both are plastic surgery faculty members in the School of Medicine.
“Life is busy — there’s sometimes no time to heal,” she said. “You have to be walking around.” Bulky post-surgical shoes are not exactly attractive for patients, and more fitted orthotics can cost $400 to $600 and take four to six weeks to arrive, she said.
“These patients, they know their feet: they would MacGyver all these pads for their feet,” Beth saw. “They lost so much fat in feet, they were stuffing makeshift padding into their shoes.”
Together, the Gusenoffs came up with two solutions: One is a device for the surgeon’s office to allow quicker and easier separation of fat for replacement in the feet, after it is removed from another part of the body. Called Push2Spin, it also reduces chances for contamination and infection, the couple say — and may be used for fat placement in other parts of the body during plastic surgery.
The other idea came from Jeff thinking out loud about the utility of bubble wrap.
That turned into PopSoles, temporary soles in everyday shoes for recovery from foot surgery or other foot treatments, such as plantar wart removal. Bubbles within the soles can be individually popped to avoid touching — and thus relieve pressure on — each foot’s sore spots, while the remaining bubbles support the rest of the foot, from the arch to the long metatarsal bones behind the toes.
Development of the proper design took a while, Beth says: “Jeff was watching me cut all these pads. I was doing arts and craft for so long.”
Today PopSoles sell on e-commerce sites, including Amazon. However, “we’re so buried under” older and better-known brands, Beth says.
“The big companies are paying big money to be seen first,” Jeff points out.
So these married partners became business partners, winning financial support from Pitt’s Center for Medical Innovation and then $25,000 in the Pitt Innovation Challenge conducted by the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.
For Push2Spin, they acquired a med-tech partner in Pittsburgh. For PopSoles, they worked with engineers at Pitt to pick the best sole materials and determine the heights of the bubbles, because “you surely don’t want extra pressure on healthy skin,” Beth says. They created prototypes; they researched patient use and reaction to the product; they formed marketing plans, found a local manufacturer, created demonstration videos, got their product into an area Walmart and are applying to take it to “Shark Tank’s” televised competition.
“Business is … surprises,” says Jeff. “The expenses, the things that go into it.”
“We’re learning patience,” Beth adds. “I guess we thought we’d just bring this to market and it would blow up.” Instead, it has been “three steps forward and two steps back. We want to share it with the rest of the world.”
Late last year, the couple were named as the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Emerging Innovators for 2025.
The award, Jeff says, has “helped open a few more doors,” attracting wider attention, including those in the Pitt community who have reached out with help for their website and legal requirements as well as with regulations for distribution internationally.
“Finding Pittsburgh people with consumer goods expertise” is hard, Jeff points out, and marketing is extremely expensive.
“It would be great if there was a company who would do some R&D and collaborating and we could help even more people,” Beth says. “We want to get wide awareness and that is a harder thing to get than anticipated. We’ve been meeting and networking with totally interesting people,” including a group for entrepreneurial couples they just discovered at Carnegie Mellon. “The life sciences ecosystem in Pittsburgh is great — it’s almost like a small family.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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