Dartmouth businessman Shawn Levangie is looking at snow clearing from a different angle.
When farmers told Levangie that they were getting sore wrists from shovelling grain and barn waste all day, he went back to the drawing board with his company's popular grain shovel at his Trail Blazer Products headquarters in Burnside.
The result is the Reverse-D Handle Shovel, which features a handle turned 90-degrees so that it's perpendicular to the shovel face.
The sideway configuration provides a better grip and extra leverage when lifting, Levangie says.
"Now the wrist doesn't bend, so it takes the strain off your wrist, and allows your forearm to do most of the lifting, and relieves your back a little bit as well," he says.
Levangie says when his company began getting rave reviews about the angle-handled shovel from farmers in the mid-west United States, he decided to create a snow shovel with the same feature.
Known mainly as a lawn and garden equipment company, Levangie knew most of his products were removed from retail shelves in the winter to make way for the new season.
Now, Levangie says, his company is able to produce sales year-round, which he hopes will result in year-round employment for all of his 29 staff, as well.
Trail Blazer Products was founded 16 years ago by Shawn's father, Curtis Levangie, who built a collapsible bucksaw that put the company on the map.
"We always try and find something different, something unique and something that makes us stand out from everybody else," Levangie said.
Trail Blazer Products are now exported to 20,000 retailers in 43 countries, including Norway, where the company's snow shovels are selling out.
"The response has been tremendous," Levangie says.
Trail Blazers Products is making a "quantifiable" difference exporting its goods, says the vice-president of the Nova Scotia branch of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters.
"Not very many companies in Canada can say that they're selling to 40-plus countries," says branch vice-president Ann Janega.
Janega says there are fewer than three per cent of companies in Canada that actually export, and the percentage in Nova Scotia is even lower.
She says Trail Blazers is particularly notable given the company's modest beginnings.
"It didn't even start in a garage, it started in an apartment," Janega says. "How many little cool products start that way as somebody's good idea at home, but very few turn it into something commercially-viable."
Janega said being a supplier to some of the world's biggest retailers is not easy.
"These firms are very demanding because they're competing internationally... so it's really notable for any company to achieve that level of marketshare," she says.
Even though the Halifax area has had very little snow so far this winter, some stores have already sold out of their initial stock of shovels, Levangie says.
But since the shovels are made in Dartmouth, stocks have been replenished in time for the next big snowfall.
Levangie, 42, lives in Dartmouth and is chairman of the local division of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters.
kmoar@hfxnews.ca
Trail Blazer's Reverse-D Handle Shovels are sold locally through Home Hardware and retail for between $20 and $25. For more information about Trail Blazer Products, go to http://trailblazerproducts.com.
