DuBOIS – Viviana Forrest, a clerk at Giant Eagle, noticed how customers would sometimes drop and break large packs of bottled water or soda while loading them into their vehicles or onto conveyor belts in the store.

She said she felt bad for them.

Then, a thought occurred to her.

“It just kept happening, so I thought, ‘there needs to some bag to hold these,’” Forrest, 22, of DuBois, said.

A student at DuBois Business College, she was in an Inventionland Institute Marketing Class and came up with an idea to prevent the spills and make carrying large packs of water or soda easier. Her fellow classmate, Janna Whitling of Hawthorne, knew about sewing and helped her bring her invention, dubbed “PakBag,” to life.

Forrest said Pak Bag can accommodate a 24-pack, two 20-packs or four 12-packs. It’s designed to be made of the same material as scuba diving suits, making it durable and water-resistant, she noted. It has mesh on the ends and a handle.

“It was pretty fun putting it all together,” said Whitling. “I’m pretty proud of what we did.”

Their instructor Darren Kite, said, “They did a lot of research on it. There are a lot of bags out there, but none to hold the water like that.”

This past winter, Forrest and Whitling took a prototype of the invention to Inventionland in Pittsburgh.

According to its website, Inventionland is “America’s largest invention factory, where corporations, retailers and inventors come for their innovative new products.”

The website notes that Inventionland has produced products that have been sold in more than 1,200 online stores and retail outlets, and its “creationeers” work in 16 unique themed sets that include a shipwrecked pirate ship, faux cave, treehouse, pet shack, giant shoe, cupcake kitchen, giant robot and castle.

The owner of Inventionland, George Davison; the creator of the Inventionland Marketing Class, Nathan Field; and several others judged Forrest’s Pak Bag and watched a commercial the girls made about the invention, Forrest said.

Forrest and Whitling walked up a drawbridge to the castle at Inventionland, where the judges were waiting. A friend of the pair went with them, dropping a 24-pack of water, on purpose, to demonstrate the problem they were trying to fix with their invention.

Forrest and Whitling presented their research to the judges, and talked about the company that they proposed to pitch their product to, Eco-Bags.

Not even realizing they were in a competition, Forrest said she and Whitling were surprised when the judges awarded them a trophy about a half-hour later.

“A lot of the them liked the sketches that I had done for the product,” Forrest said. She said one of the judges, in fact, had experienced an incident, just days before in a store, in which water from a pack of water spilled on him.

Forrest said she doesn’t know what will happen with her invention, but she is hopeful that it can be sold to a real company and find a place in stores.

“I would really hope it would work out,” she said.

She thinks it’s something that would last and would be worth the money.