Local mothers cook up good ideas and turn them into products
Motherhood provides the inspiration
Published: May 10, 2009, 12:30 am
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Annmarie Vanini was on her knees scrubbing behind the toilet for what seemed like the millionth time.
Her son, Brian, was moving from that crucial potty-training stage, transitioning from sitting on the potty to standing at the toilet. Despite practicing with toilet targets and other potty training aids, Brian just couldn’t seem to aim straight into the water.
And it was driving Vanini nuts.
So she sat down with a sketch pad and started drawing a design for what would eventually become the Flippee Toilet Shield, a curved piece of plastic that can be swiveled up to cup the toilet bowl and flipped down when not in use.
Though the stay-at-home mom had no intention of becoming an inventor, that’s exactly what happened.
“I had a problem and I fixed it,” Vanini said. “I thought, ‘If I’m doing this for myself, I have to do it for other people.’ ”
The Flippee is now sold online to grateful moms everywhere, with 300 of the $25 plastic shields sold since the launch of Vanini’s company ReeAssured Products last year.
The Ellie Bag Over Tote organizer was born of necessity, too. Amherst mom Deanna Romito was on maternity leave from her job as a third grade teacher when she realized what a pain it was to keep shuffling baby supplies and personal items back and forth from her purse to her diaper bag.
So, with help from mom Sandy Predmore, she invented the Over Tote system. It’s a diaper bag that slides over a purse so moms can easily separate bags when they want to use one or the other, and combines when they want to easily carry both. It comes with a changing pad, wipes pouch, sippy cup holder and backup bags so frazzled moms can easily grab anything they need.
Today, the pair, through their company, Precious Giggles LLC, sells their products online at Ellie- Bags.com. By the end of the month, they’ll be available locally at the Baby Bump Motherhood Center in Cheektowaga and the Care Connection Lactation & Wellness Center in Snyder.
“I think they will sell very well,” said Cheri Ryan, owner of the Care Connection. “New moms realize the value of a product that will save them on time, stress and confusion.”
That was certainly the case with Stacy Dallman. After many sleepless nights fumbling in the darkness for her wailing newborn’s lost pacifier, Dallman was at wit’s end.
“Between the new baby and my daughter, Ava, waking 4 to 5 times for her pacifier, I was up the entire night,” Dallman said.
So after some trial and error, Dallman came up with what are now known as Paci- Plushies, a series of soft stuffed animals fitted with plastic “hug rings” that attach to more than 200 different types of pacifiers.
The Paci-Plushies, which retail for $13.99 and come with a detachable pacifier and cap, make tiny pacifiers easier to locate, and give babies something to hold onto and grasp for themselves. The company is based in Lyndonville.
Nadja Piatka, founder and president of Buffalo-headquartered Nadja Foods, isn’t surprised by the success of local mom inventors, but she is awed by it.
A single mom inventor herself, Piatka built an empire from the low-fat brownies she created in her kitchen. Those brownies ended up in Subway sandwich shops around the country, landing her a spot on the Oprah Winfrey Show. $20 million later, Piatka is an author, motivational speaker and entrepreneur. Her baked goods are sold throughout North America.
She now mentors women and minority inventors and entrepreneurs through the University at Buffalo’s Center For Entrepreneurial Leadership.
“Moms have great energy and we show it every day,” Piatka said. “We’re multi-tasking entities.”
Not that the process is simple — or cheap.
Securing a patent alone can cost $8,000. And even Vanini, with a master’s degree in engineering, knew nothing about Web design, public relations, distribution or locating a plastics manufacturer.
“There are so many great ideas out there that haven’t made it out of the basement,” said Piatka. “Having a great idea is about 5 percent of the equation. Marketing, promotion, distribution and sales are 95 percent.”
One of the reasons Piatka so enjoys mentoring others is because she realizes how helpful having a go-to person would have been when she was starting out. Though moms have traditionally been very supportive of one another, communities of mom inventors and entrepreneurs are harder to come by.
Vanini agreed.
“You don’t run into other moms at the preschool who are talking about tooling plastic,” she said.
That’s one benefit of MommysIdea. com, the online community Romito launched for mom inventors. Both stay-at-home parenting and the process of developing and marketing an invention can be a grueling, isolating process. Finding and communicating with like-minded individuals — especially ones with advice to share— can make it less so.
“I think that sense of community is so important, because a lot of women starting out on an entrepreneur adventure don’t know where to turn for help,” Romito said. “We’ve found ways to help each other. It feels good to share what I’ve learned.”
And, just as life experience is instrumental in so many mom inventions, you never know where that next bit of expertise will come from.
“So many moms think if they’re good at one thing, that’s the one thing they are good at. But they have to realize they can be good at more than one thing,” Piatka said. “If you can run a household, you can run a corporation.”
schristmann@buffnews.com
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