Taking the Kids™
Taking the Kids With Parent Invented Products that Make Travel Easier
Changing a diaper in a restaurant. Pushing a stroller uphill. Sometimes even the most mundane hassles of traveling with young kids can lead new parents to journeys they never expected to take – even a new career.
Erik Monrad, for one, was wheeling his infant daughter, Clio, up and down San Francisco’s hills one day when the proverbial light bulb went off over his head: He needed a gadget that would enable him to steer his umbrella stroller one-handed.
“Since babies don’t sleep, I found myself in a situation where having a latte in my hand all of the time was a necessity,” said 38-year-old Monrad, a former union rep. “But you can’t push a stroller and drink coffee at the same time.” He also needed to make the stroller handles higher to accommodate his tall frame.
Since no one seemed to have the gizmo Monrad wanted, he set out to build one with supplies from bike and garden supply shops. Within a week, he had a prototype for a Stroller Stretcher, winning Monrad an innovation award last year from the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association. He’s now got a new company, Berkeley Baby Products (www.strollerstretcher.com), 10,000 stroller stretchers (retail: $14.95) in a warehouse and lots of stress worrying whether his product will be successful. “Would I do it again? Ask me in six months,” he jokes.
All over the country, parents are trying to turn their ideas to make travel easier with new families into new products and hopefully, businesses. By some estimates, there are more than 100 parent-ideas already being marketed. A company called Mom Inventors solicits new ideas to market and offers advice to parent entrepreneurs (www.mominventors.com) while Parents of Invention (www.parentsofinvention.com) sometimes gets dozens of products a month from parent inventors, says founder Laine Caspi. “Parents have always had ideas,” she said. ”They just didn’t know what to do with them.”
Parents have come up with luggage that doubles as a seat (www.zuca.com), travel craft and toy kits that double as a play surface (www.kidkase.com), comfy prize-winning pillows that promise to soothe even hyperactive children (www.snugglup.com), and mobiles that easily attach to a car ceiling above the baby’s car seat (www.upandawayinc.net).
“Some of the most innovative products I see come from parents,” adds Brian Beihl, who started www.familiesonboard.com, a catalog for family travel and camping products after a car trip with his own family.
These inventions don’t require rocket science – just a well-conceived way to dispense with some of the annoyances we’ve all faced when traveling with young children. Take the Teeny Towel: A scaled-down dispenser for anti-bacterial wipes or insect repellent that clips onto a stroller or diaper bag – “so parents don’t have to dig through the diaper bag whenever they need to wipe their child’s hands,” explained Caspi, who helped market the successful product ($9.99 at www.parentsofinvention.com)
Suburban Denver mom Becky Dawson came up with her Superblankie after dropping her son Jack’s stroller blanket in a puddle once too often. “It drove me crazy,” said Dawson, a former manager for IBM. She sat down in her kitchen and sewed blankets with Velcro straps that could attach to a stroller, car seat or even a diaper bag. Now the Superblankies ($14.95 and up at www.superblankie.com) are selling well, she reports, “But don’t think you’re going to get rich quick,” she laughs.
In fact, most of these parents finance their dream with credit cards and loans against their homes and retirement accounts. Lisa and Garrett Stackman, who live in Montville, NJ, aren’t ready to quit their day jobs, either. He’s an attorney and she’s an HR executive. They got the entrepreneurial bug after one particularly distasteful experience changing their son’s diaper in a restaurant restroom. Stackman began tinkering with an idea for a plastic, portable changing station that would fit over a sink but then fold to fit in a diaper bag. Two years, untold hours and thousands of dollars later – about the time baby Alex who inspired the effort was getting out of diapers – their Diaperbridge has a patent pending and is on the market ($39.99 at www.diaperbridge.com).
The biggest hurdle, of course, is the same one faced by anyone who has ever had a Big Idea: Will others agree this is the Next Best Thing?
“We’re hopeful,” says an optimistic Stackman.
© Copyright Eileen Ogintz 2005
