Sadly, following his debut on “Shark Tank,” things only went from bad to worse for Airbedz owner Jim Pittman. While Pittman touted his product as “the original truck bed air mattress” and even claimed on the show to have obtained four patents on it, it appears someone else would beg to differ. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the “dual layer for mattress truck bed” patent belongs to an inventor named Terrence Michael Hanrahan, located in Mission Viejo, California. Hanrahan first announced the debut of his product, Truck-Bedz, way back in 2004. “The idea for Truck-Bedz came one morning when I crawled off the crummy little thin air mattress in the bed of my truck and felt all the aches and pains that come with a rotten night’s sleep after a hard day’s work and play. I looked over and saw that two of my buddies wore the same tired, haggard expression and thought, ‘I need to invent something better!’ And, being an engineer by trade, that’s what I did,” he explained, per Global News Wire.
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The powers that be at Airbedz, however, are still adamant that they are the rightful owners of the patent. “Did you know that the Original Truck Bed Air Mattress was conceptualized, designed and patented by us?” the company penned in part in a lengthy Instagram post on June 30, 2023. However, according to a murky report by SharkTankBlog, the company was set to be served with a notice of patent infringement “any day now,” athough it doesn’t appear to have happened as of yet.
