ATU698 – NULU Knife with Doug Katz

My name is Douglas Katz and I am CEO and inventor of the Nulu. The Nulu is an adaptive knife. And this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis Indiana. Welcome to episode 698 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on October 11th, 2024. On today’s show, we’re excited to welcome Doug Katz, inventor of the Nulu Knife, and he’s here to tell us how this knife can make cooking more accessible for individuals with different kinds of disabilities. Listeners, we’re so excited that you joined us to listen in today. And don’t forget, you can always reach out to us. You can shoot us an email at Tech@EastersealsCrossroads.org or call our listener line (317) 721-7124. But for right now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Folks, we cannot thank you enough for giving us a listen here at Assistive Technology Update. Without you, we would not have been around for coming up on, getting pretty darn close to that 700 episode mark. But did you know that this is not the only podcast that we have? You can also check out our sister show Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. This show comes out once a month and it features panelists, Belva Smith, Brian Norton, and myself as we try to answer the questions that are plaguing your mind about assistive technology. We gather up all the questions we get during the month from emails, phone calls, and many other means, and then we do our best to answer them.

But I got to tell you folks, believe it or not, we do not know everything. So we rely on our listeners a lot to reach out to us and give us some of those answers or maybe just talk about their personal experiences and things that have happened to them. So if you like Assistive Technology Update, you may very well love Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. Again, it’s Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions where you can get your questions about assistive technology answered, or if you happen to have the answers to some of the questions asked on that show, please, please, please do reach out and let us know so that we can help the community with the answers that they so desperately seek. Much like Assistive Technology Update, you can find Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions, wherever you prefer to get your podcast. And as always listeners, thank you for listening.

Listeners, preparing your own food has benefits to health, both mental and physical, but prepping items can be a challenge for those with mobility challenges. Well, our guest today is Doug Katz and he is the inventor of the Nulu Knife and is here to tell us all about it and how it can assist individuals with disabilities with sharpening their knife skills. Doug, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much, Josh.

Yeah, I am excited to get into talking about this. It’s not something I always get to talk about. It’s still high tech, but something that can really help a ton of folks. But before we get into talking about that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Most importantly, I am disabled myself. I’m a disabled vet and that comes from both the Army time and it’s been accelerated by fun hobbies like martial arts and being really active and that wears your body out. So I’m my own client, which is kind of the most important thing of it. But just a little of my background, again, West Point grad, served in the military, then did a long stint in civilian life, corporate America, kind of what people do.

And then for my third act, I’m 53, for my third act, I moved into inventing and inventing with a focus and a passion. And it started out, I was given a knife making class by my wife, and when we moved I set up my own forge and was having some major issues and saw kind of the Nulu out of some scrap metal I had and created it from there. And that’s kind of my story. And now this is my passion. I built a great team and we’re really looking forward to bringing a really simple object that has profound impact to the people who need it most.

Awesome. And you led me right into my next question. So what is the Nulu Knife?

The Nulu, and we call it the Nulu from new Ulu. So I’m a knife nerd. The Ulu is actually indigenous knife for indigenous people, or it’s associated with the Inuit cultures up along the Arctic Circle. And it has just by its design, it was called the everything knife, and it was actually the women’s knife because they did a lot of the work. The men would go out and hunt and they’d cut hair and dress an animal and do all this stuff. So it was a very, very utilitarian efficient knife that had some inherent great ergonomic benefits, but it was sort of by happenstance and people love it. You talk to somebody who goes to Alaska, I know a lot of guys who are stationed there in the military, but people go on cruises, they usually come back with an Ulu because it’s a very, very cool knife.

But we looked and we said, well, why is it? So we deconstructed it and took some of the dynamics of why it works and re-engineered it into a more modern knife design that actually takes the functionality of a regular chef’s knife, couples it with the geometry of an Ulu. And that’s why we created the Nulu, which we call our new Ulu. And it is not perfect, but exceptional transfer of force from the user to the blade, which really helps people with issues. But we took it a step further and it is, we call it a multi-blade, multi-grip, multi-use. And the way it’s designed, and I would encourage all your listeners to check out our site Nuluknives.com because it shows video of it and basically you can grip it in a host of different ways for different functionality, which for users who have issues, that’s what’s important.

Someone who’s already disabled doesn’t need to be told, here’s an adaptive product and here’s how you have to use it. Adaption is about organic connection to the individual and creating a harmony where it makes you better at what you’re doing. And just slapping an ergonomic handle on a traditional knife misses the point. It’s creating a product, it’s not creating a better cutting experience. And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to make it where the knife is important, but it’s the catalyst to a better life, better nutrition, more independence. A lot of our target market is the aging market, which you don’t necessarily consider as disabled, or many people don’t. Many people in their senior year don’t consider themselves disabled, but they are. And we created a model that really charts aging into disability and as a result, designing around that.

No, that is absolutely great. And yeah, like you said, I mean just as we age, some things just get harder with or without a disability. So something that can really help out is for sure a really great thing. And I like the way that you said you’re not kind of telling people what they need. That’s always a hard thing because really the point of assistive technology or adaptive equipment is independence and no one gets more independence by being told what’s good for them.

Well, and we even went so far as to look and say right now the binary classification is insufficient, disabled or not disabled. There are some real big issues with approaching it that way because then you think 50 50 or you think it just creates a mental understanding of disability that isn’t right. So we created what we call the ability curve, and we created a scaled approach because what we wanted to do, as we’re trying to find strategic partners and get investment, because for us to be able to help people, we need to grow the business. So we created a scale that takes the manifestation of symptoms. We’re not treatment, we’re treating the symptoms of the manifestation of whatever issue that they’re having.

So what we do, we look at it as, okay, at what rating are people most able to benefit from our design? And by doing that, we’re able to create a big Venn diagram of everybody who has issues with strength, coordination and dexterity and say, this is that entire market. We talk to investors and such, and we tell them it’s over 80 million people and they’re shocked. I guess they’re shocked and not shocked, right? They’re like, oh, that makes sense. But none of them think in terms of that market size. And what we’re hoping to do on a grander scale with Nulu and with other products potentially later on is to really appeal to that 80 million people and growing with simple products that solve these problems and make it a place where investors want to go.

Because if we could get that backing we can continue, part of our DNA is to work with people in those populations that benefit the most to help us with design. We want to listen to the customers. Our design is unique in that we can do some interesting things with the handle because the force transfer doesn’t put stress on the handle. On our roadmap, we have plans to create specific handles for some of the more complex situations. If you’re not able to hold a knife, something with finger holes as an example then allows an individual to use that, where that might not apply to everybody.

Nice. And Doug, you brought up a great point of involving individuals that’ll eventually be using these devices kind of in the creation. Do you have any stories or maybe surprises that came up as you were involving potential users in the creation of Nulu?

I do. I do. One market that we totally were not looking at was vision impaired. And we were talking to another adaptive office actually, because one of our big things I do like to highlight, we are reaching out to all the state adaptive offices around the country. There really is no certification or anything out there today for products like we make, but that’s where the rubber hits the road. The stuff that you guys do is where people get awareness on how to get their life better. So we’ve been reaching out to those groups.

And we were talking to one and they said, “This is great for vision impaired people.” And we’re like, “Wow, vision impaired and a knife,” and it makes sense. When you lose your vision, you don’t lose the need to eat or to want independence. It was just something we didn’t think about because my issues are more with upper extremities, but they said because of the design and the control and the fact that we’ve made some feature choices and design choices that make it safer, they were like, “This is a great product for somebody who can’t see or has vision impairment to where it’s hard to see what they’re doing, but they know better where the cutting is happening.” And that blew our mind.

The other one was Down Syndrome. I was at an event with Gigi’s Playhouse, which is a great organization, and one of the local leaders here was like, “This would be great for kids with Down because they are working toward their independence.” So we were really focused on one side of the ability curve. Something popped up where we’re like, well, wait a minute. And that actually that’s helped what spawned the ability curve. Looked and we said, “Well, you know what? Actually kids with Down Syndrome or not have an inherent weakness and strength.” So we are looking at, once we go down the road of working with the folks who are losing independence, which is a really big part, that’s where people spend the most money, it seems. That’s another one that blew our mind. But then we were like, well, why didn’t we see it?

And what we found is in that world, parents of children with disabilities are immensely vocal. And when they find something that works, they promote it out there. And we want to work with those groups because the ability to give somebody value in their own mind and independence is so important. And that’s all we hear from all the parents is all my kid wants to be is independent and included, and this creates that. And we’re actually starting even to reach out to cooking schools and other organizations that would benefit from partnering with us to have events where we can have both people on the aging side learning to adapt their cooking to where they can keep their independence, but also the children’s side and especially children with disabilities because this is where habits and skills are built. So we’re very, very into trying to grow that world and really change how work in the kitchen is looked at.

Oh, definitely. And if you have adaptive tools, then if it’s a cooking class, the class itself could be taught for individuals with disabilities and individuals without disabilities in the same class as long as you have the tools that you need.

Yes. Well, part of the reason we created the ability curve is because there are more people who could technically be quantified as disabled than the categorization or the labels would lead to. So the reason we made the scale is it’s like, okay, it shouldn’t be, wow, everything hurts so bad I can’t do it anymore.

And we took some inspiration from the Army model. I’m a disabled veteran. The way the Army works is if you have multiple issues, they take a hundred percent and they take your largest issue and they subtract that from a hundred percent and maybe you’re 60% and the next disability is a percentage of the 60%, but it’s the stacked aspect. But never in that model does it say because you’re disabled, you can’t do things. And I tend to look, and I’m sort of the normal paradigm where I’m like, well, my ankles are bad, so I can’t go out running and I don’t much anymore because it gives issue, but then someone will blow by me on prosthetic legs. I’m like, what am I thinking? And that’s where we’re really trying to change the dialogue and really how it’s all looked at through simple everyday things.

Frankly, we were at an event in Milwaukee two days ago and people were coming by the table that we had set up. It was very interesting because there were a lot of people in their mid-thirties to mid-forties, which is kind of the edge of our market. And all of them were like, “Wow, this is great for my elder parent, my aging parent, but I think I’m going to buy one for myself.” So what we’re hoping is that it becomes, and I hate to use viral, because it’s overused, but a little bit viral where people are like, I have my beautiful knives for when I want sort of that old feeling, but day to day, I just want something that works.

And we had an interesting epiphany. There was a chef who came by my house who lives close to me, and he was trying it out and I was showing him the difference, a normal knife versus the Nulu. And he’s like, “Well, you’re holding the normal knife wrong.” I was holding it by the handle. And he’s like, “No, a trained chef.” And this guy was a Culinary Institute of America chef. He goes, “No, a real chef only holds the handle if they’re kind of doing a chopping motion. The rest of the time, they hold the spine of the blade and they use it that way, which is ergonomically a million times worse than just holding the handle to your hand.” So we were looking at it and we’re like, well, wait a minute, trained chefs. And I said, “Then what is the handle for?” And they said, “For balance, because you’re holding the blade.”

And I’m like, “Well, wait a minute. How has nobody looked at this in a way to say, if you’re holding the blade and the handle that you’re not using is there for balance, why don’t you move the handle?” And that’s where we’re really hoping that there’s this transformation. Until there’s something out there that’s an alternative, people don’t know that there’s an alternative. But we’re fully hoping is that this alternative catches on.

And our goal out of the gate is affordable. We want as many people to afford this as possible, but later on we hope to make really, really nice beautiful knives that somebody who’s a knife geek who maybe wants to Damascus or whatever, can have something like this. Because again, we really do believe it’s going to change how people look at it.

What we found typically is it takes about three days. I have another friend that graduated a couple of years ahead of me from West Point, and he’s a chef. He trained after leaving the army and we were working with him and the first day he was like, “Doug, I don’t get it.” And this is a good friend of mine, I’ve known him a long time. And I said, “Ryan, just keep trying. Work with it. Look at the footage, the video footage and stuff.” And by day three he’s like, “Oh, I get it. And in fact, I get it so well that we really need to engage commercial kitchens because the able-bodied,” and I’m doing air quotes, the listeners can’t, “the able-bodied today will be the disabled if in commercial kitchens they continue to use regular knives.”

And we’ve talked to orthopedic surgeons who say, “Yeah, I see a meat cutter or somebody who’s been in the cooking industry at least once a week, probably more people than.” So we looked at it and we said, “Wow, you know what, there’s kind of two sides to this assistive adaptive disabled world is there’s a preventative component.”

And the preventative component doesn’t mean I’m able-bodied and going to completely lose it. I look at it as I just bought a car. I use a lot of analogies. I bought my wife a car that is a plug-in hybrid, and it’s got the braking, the regenerative braking so you can kind slow down a hill. And we look at objects like ours as regenerative braking on the ability curve. It’s an ability to capture that energy that you still have to the things you want to do and still live the life that you want to do and not sort of descend into more and more disability or more and more thinking you’re disabled. So we are looking at it and saying the quicker that we can bring more people into that fold, then the more it will be widely accepted.

And you brought up some just great points there, the repetitive motion injuries and being able to cut down on those. And then I really just love the customization and the different ways that it can be customized. Doug, what phase of planning, distribution, or what kind of phase are you currently in with the Nulu Knife?

Wonderful question. We are launching a Kickstarter in mid-October. I told my marketing team, that’s my birthday present, get it to me for my birthday. But we’re hoping to ship early next year. It looks like we’re going to meet those goals. So anybody interested, we have updates they can subscribe to when our updates are happening.

The great part is I built an amazing team. So I really do believe that we’ll get it there on time. And right now we’re bootstrapping it. The investment world is very, very hard right now for anybody. So the strength of having a product like this, and one interesting part to my team, which actually plays on this is we’re all over 50. And this was like an accident. I say that my journey’s been somewhere between Forrest Gump and Oppenheimer because I’ve sort of been this feather on the wind, but then tripping on amazing talent. And as a result, we’ve been able to move this further because every one of us is in some way a customer. I’m the most so because I’m the most beat up, but that’s allowed us to move very, very quickly.

So we conceived this thing about a year ago, about two years ago was when I first built it in my garage. Super ugly one. I have actually a museum that I call it in my garage of all the different prototypes. And we just finished the final prototype about six months ago, and that’s the one that we’re sending to Adaptive Offices for Evaluation. And speaking of that, any of your listeners who are part of an organization that would benefit from doing an evaluation, we have a lot of our last prototype, which is a functional knife that we are happy and committed to send to anybody who wants to evaluate it so we could get more data back because as we are finalizing our design, there may be small things that we can do to make it better, or the next one on the roadmap thing gets better. But I would encourage anybody to reach out to us for an evaluation and we would be happy to coordinate that.

Excellent. And Doug, you brought this up a little bit earlier, but if our listeners want to find out more or reach out for an evaluation or anything like that, what’s a good way for them to be able to do that?

We have social media sites on all the major platforms, I think, except for TikTok and stuff. I just haven’t figured that one out yet. They can go to our website, they can look me up, find me on LinkedIn and reach out to me there. My personal email address is dkatz@goredleg.com. That’s a company that we’re creating actually around we’re bringing the Nulu to market, but eventually the intent is to bring more to market and maybe even help other people who have a product. This team is so amazing that if someone’s got the ideation down and they know it’s the right thing and we can validate that, then we would like to help other people too and help them bring it to market.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Doug, as we’re getting a little bit short on time, can you just tell us the most important things folks need to know about the Nulu Knife, kind of who it can help? I know we’ve went over this a little bit, but just to kind reiterate that point.

Absolutely. Absolutely. The biggest thing is that it looks weird, but that’s the strength, right? It is truly unique. And the best way I can describe it is one of my team, I was lucky enough to bring on a over-thirty-year veteran of the knife industry. And he looked and he said, “This is something.” So he knows that this dynamic, the geometry of how it cuts.

I guess if I’ve got a second, I’ll explain sort of where it comes, and it’s hard without the visual, but if you were to picture a circle, now most Ulus are half moons, but if you were to picture an arc along a circle, our blade kind of takes a half moon and takes it further, but the best transfer of force is a straight line. That doesn’t happen with a traditional knife. So our handle, in a sense, becomes the center point along an arc that would make a circle if it made the full circle. And the individual using it is creating the vectors along that arc to be able to transfer force in a way that they need it.

And the cutting surfaces, the blade, the contiguous axis, each part of it is a little bit different. So you can cleave with it, you can precision cut with it, you can slice with it. It sounds like an infomercial, but really you can do it, but there’s more. But you can do all those things. And that’s really what we were getting at. And the big part is that we are looking at, and the design was all about making the user better, harmonizing with the user instead of saying, wow, you have to hold it in this weird turning your body in all these weird ways to use it the right way because someone says that’s what chefs do. So long winded answer that I hope help covers it.

Yeah, no, definitely. Most definitely. I think that describes it really well, and definitely listeners go and check out the website so you can kind of get a look at it, even a better idea. But Doug, I think that described it better than I possibly ever could. So that was perfect. We’ll put a link down to the website as well as Doug’s email down in the show notes.

Well, Doug, thank you so much for coming on, for telling us about the Nulu Knife, and we are just really excited to see it come out and be able to help folks with just all different kinds of needs.

Thank you so much for having me. I wish I could say this is work, but any chance to talk about, one, something I created because everybody likes that, but two, the chance to spread awareness because really the invention happened when I was having a particularly bad flare up before a shoulder surgery, and it was demoralizing to say, hey, I want to go cook something in the kitchen and not being able to. And that really, I don’t want anyone to ever feel that. I want somebody to say, hey, you know what? I’m going to make a salad today and be able to do it. Or say, you know what? I don’t want to eat pre-prepared, overly processed food. I would like to own my own diet and nutrition.

And as people age and people who have a disability like MS or Parkinson’s move into greater disability, it’s even more important to have anti-inflammatory diets and all these kinds of things that can help people. And it’s our goal to make sure that they can do that, and it’s so important. So I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate the opportunity to have come on.

Excellent. Well, thanks again, Doug. Have a great day.

You too, man. Thanks.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at Tech@Eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or Intrac. You can find out more about Intrac at relayindiana.com.

A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye bye.