Inventions in Everything: Disposable Boxer Shorts

The animated television show South Park has satirized many things over the years, but none more effectively than its creators’ take on corporate business plans. Yes, we’re talking about the “Underpants Gnomes” episode, which featured one of the greatest corporate presentations of all time!

Here it is, in all its technicolor glory and salty language (which is, of course, part of its DNA):

That scene with the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan came quickly to the IIE team’s mind thanks to the patented innovation we’re featuring in this edition. Maria T. Portela’s remarkable invention of Disposable Boxer Shorts, for which she received U.S. Patent 6,539,554 on 1 April 2003.

The patent illustrations don’t really do it justice but here are Figures 5, 6 and 7, which give a sense of how the disposable material used to craft the undergarment comes together.

The patentable trick to making boxer shorts disposable isn’t the pattern emphasized by these figures, but rather the material out of which they are made. The patent’s description of its illustrations tell us exactly what inventor Maria T. Portela had in mind as she conceived her innovation:

A preferred embodiment of the present disposable boxer shorts is shown in an exploded front view in FIG. 1. It is comprised of a back panel 10, a right front panel 11, and a left front panel 12, all made of a strong cloth-like paper, such as the material used for making the paper towel sold under the trademark “VIVA” by the Kimberly Clark company.

At this point, we’d like to point out this is not a satire and we are not making any of this up.

Intellectual property attorney Gene Quinn was also quite impressed by Maria T. Portela’s vision:

Essentially, these are boxer shorts made out of paper towels, but not just any paper towels. These boxer shorts are made out of VIVA paper towels. I personally would have thought that BOUNTY (i.e., the Quicker Picker-Upper) would have made a better choice, but what is objectively best is not what the best mode requirement is all about. To satisfy the best mode the inventor needs to provide description of his/her subjective preferences.

The “best mode requirement” is a legal concept that comes from a statutory requirement in U.S. patent law. To receive a patent, inventors must disclose what they think is the most effective means by which their concept may be put into practical application. Without that discussion, the patent would not have been issued.

We went looking to see if Maria T. Portela’s patented disposable boxer shorts ever made it to the marketplace, and that’s what ultimately led us to the Underpants Gnomes business model, which we modified for this product.

• Phase 1: Make disposable boxer shorts out of Viva paper towels.
• Phase 2: ?
• Phase 3: Profit!

Alas, we couldn’t find any evidence of boxer shorts having been produced from Kimberly Clark’s Viva paper towels and sold to consumers. We imagine the marketers at the paper products giant couldn’t work out what Phase 2 needed to be to make disposable boxer shorts a mass-produced consumer product staple.

From the Inventions in Everything Archives

The IIE team has previously uncovered the following underwear-related invention, which involves quite different materials:

• Inventions in Everything: Bulletproof Underwear

This won’t be our last time discussing disposable underwear. As part of our research for this edition, we came across another patent for disposable underwear, which may get a true shot at getting to the marketplace. We’ll get to the story of that invention sometime later this year.