Scott Moorehead suffered a traumatic brain injury when fell in the driveway, while teaching his 6-year-old son how to skateboard. He recovered from the internal bleeding and concussion but never regained his smell. The connection between the olfactory nerves in his nose and his brain had been severed.
“Until you can’t smell at all you have no idea how emotional the experience can be,” said Moorehead, who fell into a deep depression. “You start to think about these really awful things, like, someday my daughter is going to get married and I’m going to walk her down the aisle and I’m going to give her a big hug, and I’m going to have no idea what she smelled like.”
Despite his depression, Moorehead isn’t one to give up easily. He’s a successful businessman, running the largest Verizon retailer in the nation. Through a friend, he found out about a team at Virginia Commonwealth University working on converting chemical scents into useful electrical signals and offered to not only become their test subject but also their business partner. He supplied the initial round of funding to kick-off the commercialization efforts.
Together, they’ve launched a startup called Lawnboy Ventures, which Moorehead hopes will not only bring back his own sense of smell but help millions of others in the same position.
