The rocky road from inventor to businessman

Antoine Sayah is learning how to actually build a business. Two years ago, he was an undergraduate studying architecture and working on an assignment for a design class. Students were tasked with building a product that was “useful in your everyday life,” he recalls. A Jounieh native, Sayah loves the beach. He made a foldable beach mattress with a triangular headpiece for comfortable lounging which offers far more than just support. With an embedded 7-watt solar panel, it has USB ports for charging electronics (tablets, mobile phones, etc.) and a small refrigeration system to keep beverages cold (with 2-liter storage on the standard-sized model). For a year after he passed the class, he used his crude prototype to tan in his garden at home, he says. Friends kept encouraging him to make more and sell. By July 2015, he was convinced and started marketing the product – dubbed Beachill –