A Jersey City inventor created a bike rack to carry packages of different shapes

on July 12, 2013

Design engineer and Jersey City resident Beda Angelo Pormentilla, 27, never would have guessed that a 1 a.m. craving run on his bicycle to the local supermarket for his pregnant wife, Melanie, would turn into just the inspiration the he needed for his first invention.“It’s one of those things, you know, that never would have happened, had I not taken my bike to the grocery store that night,” he said.Pormentilla explained that the gallon of milk, several cereal boxes and fruit he bought that night fell off his bike’s rack, and spilled all over the road in no time.“I had to walk my bike home in one hand, and I carried the box in the other hand, and I was exhausted by the time I got home,” he recalled.Using that experience as a catalyst, he developed a bike rack prototype later dubbed, Wingspan, a back- mounted bike rack that expands out horizontally, allowing bicyclists to secure items with a built-in bungee cord, he explained.“Most conventional bike racks, the ones that are rear-facing, they have a very narrow profile, so you can only load so much on there before everything kind of gets very unbalanced,” he said.

Pormentilla added that his design allows for versatility to accommodate packages of different sizes and shapes. “This design pretty much eliminates all jury-rigging that has to be done.”

Pormentilla’s design was recently chosen by Quirky, an online invention company, to be produced and sold, according to Tiffany Markofsky, director of public relations. “This is a product everybody’s excited about,” she added. “It’s definitely clever.”

Pormentilla’s invention is currently in development, and could come to market by year’s end, according to Markofsky.

“It was very surreal,” Pormentilla explained of being chosen. “It was like I was on cloud nine, because I had worked so hard in developing this product, and I knew it had a lot of potential.”
Pormentilla, who attended Saint Peter’s Preparatory School, before going on to major in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Rutgers, explained that he always wanted to invent things that could improve people’s lives.

“I told myself, one day, it’d be nice for me to invent something that could help the masses,” he said. “I always had that passion in me to make something great.”