Oklahoma Christian University alumni Garrett McCurrach and Drew Bellcock are the creative minds behind a new way to take a shower.
McCurrach and Bellcock, both Mechanical Engineering majors at Oklahoma Christian, are now business partners on the showerhead project and several other new start-up inventions. McCurrach, the chief operating officer of Gradescale, was the mastermind behind the new kind of showerhead.
“I went on my honeymoon with my wife and we stayed at a hotel that had two shower heads facing each other, and as soon as I got in I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I’ve been taking showers wrong all my life,’” McCurrach said. “It was like a hot tub standing up. When I got home and I turned on my shower head and I was staring at the back wall, missing the other shower head, and it was like taking half of a shower—it felt so wrong.”
Not long after his honeymoon, McCurrach became captivated with the idea of a dual-headed showerhead and wanted one in his own home. McCurrach said he has been brainstorming and inventing as long as he can remember, so recreating the shower was an obvious desire for him.
“Just as a joke with my wife, I took a shower hose and taped It to the other side of the shower wall, and I just became obsessed with trying to get this into a form that people could use,” McCurrach said.
McCurrach and Bellcock were roommates at Oklahoma Christian and began coming up with many inventions while at school—some funny and some that never left the ground and then some they are still working on today.
“I was the first guinea pig, other than his wife,” Bellcock, who serves as Gradescale’s CEO, said. “He told me to come over and bring my swimsuit, then he asked me if I liked the shower, and I was like yeah it’s pretty cool. I helped him do some of models, helped buy a 3D printer and supported and shared the word.”
The model they have settled on is an inexpensive way to turn showers at home into the luxury shower McCurrach enjoyed on his honeymoon. The prototype runs water through the curtain rod, which then leads to the second showerhead, giving one a dual-sided, Jacuzzi-like shower.
The shower is still in the early stages of being produced, but McCurrach and Bellcock’s Kick Starter will help them to get the money to start manufacturing the showerhead for buyers.
McCurrach and Bellcock work on many other projects together they said, mainly focused on real-world problems—looking at what is not working well in the world and finding a way to better the quality of life of others.
“Being in engineering is very focused in solving problems, and a lot of what Garrett and I work on is fun and it is cool, but most of the stuff that we work on is trying to solve real-world problems,” Bellcock said. “I think being at OC with all the professors here, even outside of the major we were in, they were always teaching us to keep our eyes open to the things around you, which is super important as a Christian too—to see what is going on around you and then to take action.”
McCurrach and Bellcock said they want to invest the knowledge they have gained and learned through their successes and failures after college to students who may be struggling to find their path.
“If you do not have a lot of money but you have a lot hustle, it is really easy to launch something on Kick Starter and get a lot of traffic from that,” McCurrach said. “You do not have to spend a lot of money to do that. A lot of people that are buying know that it is pre-ordered and that is going to take a while to get into production.”
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