Working Mother Sells Coats to Buckle in Babies

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Working mother sells coats to buckle in babies. Hey friends, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. Your host, Chris Guillebeau here. I've got a story for you here today, a detailed case study of somebody who has an idea.

They want to make the world a better place, solve an important need, make kids safer, but also do this in a way that they get paid. Nothing wrong with that. Even if you have a good idea to make the world a better place, you need to get paid for it, or at least have your costs covered somehow, right? So in this case, she makes a product, which I'll tell you all about. It's for kids in car seats who have puffy winter coats.

So if your kid has a winter coat that's kind of hard to get off, it's a little bit of a pain to put them in the car seat. But as I learned in the original research for this episode, it's not safe for kids to wear those puffy coats when they're getting buckled up in the car seats. So this working mother, she's also a working mother, she solves the problem. She sees a problem, she sets out to solve it. She does, she builds a business that several years later, in fact, is still going.

So I'll tell you about that a little bit at the end. But first, the story of Dalia and the Buckle Me Baby Coats business. [Music]

As a working mother of three, Dalia risked new chaos. One battle stood out each winter. Each car trip meant wrestling off a puffy coat for the car seat, then wrestling it back onto a fidgety toddler at the destination, times three.

She enforced a hard rule, no bulky coats under harnesses. And the reason was physics. A typical puffer coat can add up to about four inches of compressible bulk. In a car crash, air squeezes out the harness slackens and a child can be thrown from the seat. Yet no parent wants a shivering child at the curb.

Back when she started, alternatives were hard to find. You could layer thin fleeces or hunt down specialty car seat safe coats, like the one kid road coat, but choices were limited and hard to discover. The coat shuffle remained a daily pain point for lots of parents. The spark arrived mid struggle. Why does the zipper have to be in the middle?

If a coat opened from the side, the harness could contact the child's body without removing the coat at all. Dalia began sketching, then searched for help to build a prototype and get it crash tested. She had no manufacturing background and had to ask around a lot, but a break came via a small Boston Globe listing for a tailor who did prototypes. He said yes, introduced her to pattern making and connected her to affordable sample resources. Still, the bill's piled up.

Patterns in production samples, instrumented, sled tests and governmental compliance. But the prototype did what she envisioned. The coat closed on the side and then at the seat, you could flip the front panel open, move the fabric aside and buckle the harness directly against the child's chest. No bulky layers underneath. Then the coat closed back over the strapped kid for warmth.

Armed with a working sample, she applied for a patent and pitched outerwear makers. But the response was chilly. Executives didn't see the car seat problem as worth redesigning coats over and Dalia lacked an industry network of parents to vouch for the daily struggle. Overloaded with family life and also pursuing a master's in counseling, she shelved the project, the one that got away. But two years later, in a parking lot, she watched a mom fighting the same fight with a miserable toddler.

Seeing that experience flip the switch. If manufacturers wouldn't listen, parents would. She dusted off a prototype, filmed a simple demo with her nephew and posted it on Facebook. That video went viral. More than 500,000 views and thousands of comments from parents and grandparents who wanted a safer, warmer way.

Now Dalia had attention, but still no inventory and no capital. Riding the momentum, she launched a Kickstarter campaign to take pre-orders while she sourced a production. And she called her new business, Buckle Me Baby Coats. After the campaign funded, she faced a seven month gap before delivery. Rather than go dark, she showed the work.

Factory updates, test clips, candid notes from life with three kids. She answered comments, sent newsletters and worked events and trade shows. Without quite planning it, she built a brand through conversation. Peers began recommending her to press and partners. Today, winter is peak season.

Buckle Me Baby Coats pulls in up to $12,000 in monthly sales, driven largely by parents and grandparents. This is a side hustle of course, but she's still going strong. She's overcoming other challenges. An initial made in the USA run proved so expensive that it barely broke even. So she shifted manufacturing overseas.

She's also had to navigate more safety testing, make adjustments along the way, but the core product has stayed parent friendly. A warm coat that opens where the harness needs to go. So kids stay safe and comfortable and parents keep their sanity. And what about some lessons here? Some lessons from Dahlia's path.

First of all, she wanted to solve a real daily problem for a clearly defined user. She built for the exact moment she faced multiple times a day. She also went to the audience, not the gatekeepers. Her relatable video reached hundreds of thousands of parents and grandparents when manufacturers wouldn't return calls. She also kept talking during the in-between, like after she raised funds, but before the product was delivered, there was a long gap there.

And so she saw it as a relationship building window, not a liability. Also, she adjusted the model as she went along. US production couldn't support the price point, so she moved overseas. Buckleme Baby Coats began with a mom asking why a zipper had to sit in the middle. It became a patent backed crash tested answer to a problem millions of families face each winter.

The near term looks warmer, healthier margins from offshore production, a broader retail footprint that includes Amazon, and word of mouth from the community that sparked the whole thing. Dahlia is buckled in for the ride and thousands of safer school runs to come. Buckleme Baby Coats was chosen out of nearly 8,000 companies as a FedEx small business grant winner in its first year. And as I noted, we first featured Buckleme Baby Coats years ago, but the business is still going strong. Check it out for yourself, bucklemecoats.com.

You can see pictures of Dahlia and her family. You can see not only the original product, but a bunch of other products as well. She's got car seat blankets, car seat sleep sacks. That's pretty cool. I want one of those for myself.

Pajamas, hats, many other things. And she also sells her products on Amazon, which is cool, but check out her site. Again, bucklemecoats.com. And as always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. I hope you hear this story and it gets you thinking about something you can do.

What problem can you solve? What solution can you offer? How can you build a product or a service around an idea you have? Every single day, we're bringing you case studies, stories, tips, questions, and answers, all designed to get you thinking and taking action. So thank you for joining me today.

Detailed notes, all the archives of the podcast, 3,300 plus episodes at sidehustleschool.com. That's it for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]