2022 Shark Tank Update
We're joined by Becca Davison, co-inventor of UnbuckleMe, an innovative, patented tool that makes it easy to open kids’ car seat buckles. She's a Shark Tank alum who experienced the most unusual event in the Shark Tank: all five Sharks were interested in investing in and partnering with UnBuckleMe.
When Becca's mom Barb offered to help out with childcare, they identified a problem, and Barb was uniquely positioned to solve it. Fast forward 5 years later, UnbuckleMe is a top selling product on Amazon with over 6k reviews, available at Target, Walmart, buybuyBABY and loved by parents & grandparents across the country.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
3/29/2022
Kurt Elster: Hello, and welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. On today’s episode, we are talking to Becca Davison, a Shark Tank alum who had the very rare and unusual experience of all five sharks wanted to invest, partner, however you want to phrase it. They were all interested. This is a rarity. This never happens. And so, I was excited to hear what product could have possibly had them all frothing with excitement, right? I’m sure Mark Cuban would be thrilled to hear himself described as frothing. We’re gonna get to the bottom of that today as well as hear how Becca marketed this product, invented it, manufactured it, all the good details that you want to know.
I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And Becca, thank you for joining us.
Becca Davison: Thank you so much for having me.
Kurt Elster: Wow. Okay, so let’s start with your business, your product is UnbuckleMe, right? UnbuckleMe.com?
Becca Davison: That’s right.
Kurt Elster: Other than a command that has been issued from the back seat of my car by my toddler on numerous occasions, what is an UnbuckleMe?
Becca Davison: That’s a great question and you’re definitely spot on with some of our thinking around what to call this thing, so like you I have young kids, but also our business started actually very… In the very beginning, I guess I’ll say, whenever I first moved back to Houston to be closer to family and I had my first daughter, and I was working in the corporate world, definitely had no experience in entrepreneurship, really didn’t see this career path change in my life. I was kind of on maternity leave from a corporate job looking into childcare options as I was about to go back to work, and my mom lives nearby and said, “I’m happy to take her a couple days a week.” And I thought, “Great, that’s a win-win.”
So, it wasn’t more than maybe a few months into that I was back at work and my mom just happened to mention to me, she said, “You know, you’ve got this car seat for her, and I want to take her out to do things, but I can’t push the red button. It’s just too hard. It’s stiff. It requires a lot of pressure.” My mom has a bit of arthritis in her hands but other than that is very active and healthy, but you know, has trouble kind of opening water bottles sometimes, things like that in her hands, so she couldn’t do it. So, we thought, “Well, let’s just go try to see if there’s another car seat on the market that’s easier for you,” and lo’ and behold, there is not a car seat that’s easy for kids… Well, I should say easy for anyone to open because you don’t want kids to be able to unbuckle themselves, and that’s really important, and our government knows that, and that’s why they actually have federal regulations around how difficult that button needs to be. It actually has a much higher threshold of force required to open it than many adult seatbelts in cars, and not a lot of people know that.
But it explains why you have so many parents cursing about how difficult it is to unbuckle their kids.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It is not… I think every parent, if you say to any parent, “Hey, have you ever fought with a car seat?” You’ll immediately get that look that tells you, that haunted look that tells you like not only have they struggled with this one time, this is just like an ongoing known issue of the car seat experience.
Becca Davison: Well, and you do it so many times a day, right? Getting your kids in and out. And I’ll preface this by saying car seats are tremendous lifesaving devices. There’s complexity around them. They’re heavy, they’re bulky, there’s things that are difficult, but it’s-
Kurt Elster: We’re not besmirching car seats.
Becca Davison: Not knocking car seats by any means, so it fully makes sense that you don’t want kids to unbuckle themselves, so that was sort of the problem and the challenge at hand was like, “Okay, my mom physically can’t take my…” And I’ll give you some examples of how real this played out, like she took my daughter out somewhere, I think to go to the zoo or something, and physically was in the parking lot and had to flag somebody down and be like, “Can you unbuckle this? I can’t get my kid out.” And that’s not safe. Obviously, in an emergency it’s not safe. It's not empowering for an adult to not be able to unbuckle a young child.
Kurt Elster: And if it’s like a toddler, that can freak a toddler out if they think they’re like, “Hold on, I can’t get out of this car seat?”
Becca Davison: Well, that’s where they’re like, “Unbuckle me, unbuckle me!” And that’s kind of the challenge is like for someone with limited hand strength, she couldn’t do it. And we found there’s other people, not just… The grandparents was kind of where we started with this, but I’ll talk later about kind of where this has grown, but going back to our story, my mom I really believe was the perfect person on the planet to be able to address this problem and solve it, so she is an occupational therapist, and she’s retired now, and she was at the time, but she spent an entire career adapting equipment for patients with disabilities of the hand, like this was her wheelhouse, so people with post-surgery rehabilitation, she made splints for them. Spinal cord patients, spinal cord injuries, with paraplegia, she helped create adaptive tools and devices to help them maximize their ability within their disability.
So, this was very much in her wheelhouse, so she thought, “I just need to create an adaptive tool.” Because again, you don’t want to mess with the car seat. There’s nothing wrong with the seat. You want it to be difficult to open. But for her, she needed something to help her.
Kurt Elster: Can’t modify the seat. The seat is operating by design and regulation.
Becca Davison: Exactly, exactly, and so it was… Yeah. That was kind of where we were headed, was like, “How do we make it easier?”
Kurt Elster: Your mom’s helping you with your kids, and so she’s experiencing some arthritis, so she’s experiencing this genuine difficulty with the car seat, but she knows from her professional career, okay, maybe there’s something we could do here, and you said… Did you say like adaptive devices?
Becca Davison: Yeah. I mean, adaptive equipment I think is what they call it in the world of occupational therapy and physical therapy, but it’s the simplest of concepts, right? It’s things like using rubber bands, using levers, things that… Pulley systems, just any sort of simple machines, really, to help transition and move forces around to different muscles. If you’ve got weakness, you move it to the stronger muscles. There’s all kinds of really interesting anatomy and physiology behind so many… so much of the work that OTs do. I think it’s fascinating.
But that’s exactly where her brain went, was like, “How do I create a little tool or piece of equipment that will solve this problem?” And she was like, “You know, it needs to have something around the back of it.” She just kind of had this vision in her brain and I credit so much of that to her just knowing what might work for this problem that she very quickly kind of created, and not many people have prototype material on hand, but she did. She had some splint material, so the kind of like pliable thermoplastic material that they make splints out of, she had some of that in her garage, and she grabbed it, and she heated it up in her pan. You kind of warm it up and it becomes very pliable and then it hardens when it dries, but she created like a C-shaped tool and kind of like… I remember she came over to my house at one point and was like, “I need you to screw this in here. I think this is gonna solve the problem.”
I was like, “Mom, I don’t know what you’re doing, but fine, I’ll help you.” But that was it and she created it very quickly. And it worked for her. I mean, I remember like a couple weeks later she’s like, “By the way, that problem I mentioned about the car seat thing, it’s solved. I got it. I got a solution.”
Kurt Elster: At this time, neither of you had set out to build a business here. She just had this very real problem in her current life, and she had from her professional career this skillset to rapid prototype a tool that solves it. You’ve got a bigger area to press on. It’s adding… I’m guessing the way it’s like C-shaped, so it’s probably gonna add leverage, so she’s got like a-
Becca Davison: Yes, that’s exactly it.
Kurt Elster: … force multiplier on there. Okay.
Becca Davison: That’s exactly it. Yeah. You totally got the physics behind it. It’s just a force multiplier is all it is, so you pushed on the end of it. If you think of an old-fashioned nutcracker, right? You don’t crack a nut. You can’t crack a nut with your hands, but you put kind of that old fashioned kind of nutcracker on it and you push the ends of it together and you’re multiplying that force so that you can crack the nut.
And that’s exactly the concept that she was applying to the seatbelt buckle.
Kurt Elster: So, she built a nutcracker for car seat buckles.
Becca Davison: She built a nutcracker for car seat buckles. Exactly. It just was a nutcracker with only the kind of nutcracker is only on one side, because the button you push from the top, but that’s exactly it. And that would have been the end of it, I guess. She was happy. She had solved her problem. She was using it for a few weeks.
And something about it, I guess I just… Maybe seeing it a few times, watching her use it, and seeing how, really thinking about how transformative it was, right? We went from her saying, “I can’t take my granddaughter out of the house to do things,” to sending me pictures at work of like, “Hey, we’re at the zoo. We’re at the park.” I mean, that is a true… This little gadget transformed her ability to spend time with her granddaughter. It was really it kind of struck me as like, “Wow, this is cool.”
And then the next thought was like, “Are you the only person on the planet that has had this problem?” Is there a market for this? And market implies that I was thinking about a business. I really wasn’t. It was just if this has been so lifechanging for you, there has to be someone else that would benefit from this, and should we share this with others to have the same experience?
Kurt Elster: So, where did you go from there? You saw the difference it made just in quality of life here, and convenience, and confidence, so you’re like, “This is a really simple…” Someone had to think of the tool first, but once you see it made, you’re like, “All right, the tool itself is not that complicated.” And certainly, she’s not the only person with arthritis struggling with these car seats that are it turned out by requirement and design, work the way they do. And so, the next thought is, “All right, can other people benefit from it?” And you know the answer, almost definitely, but then where do you go from there?
Becca Davison: Yeah. That was kind of the next question is like where do we want to take this, and I have to say I probably got excited about this idea of like, “Well, maybe we can make it… Maybe this can be a business.” And so, I think that’s when the wheels started turning of like, “What would even be the next step?” And I remember, I think I mentioned it to my mom, like, “We could make these,” and I think her first response was like, “Yeah, I could make a few more. I think I have some more material in the garage.” I was like, “No, no, no. Like if we had it made.” And she’s like, “I don’t even know what that…” You know, it’s like that’s just so, as you said earlier, like so foreign as a concept to think about. But you know, by chance I think there was a few other kind of baby brands, like mom invented, I think there’s this incredible wave right now of parent inventors that are bringing things to market based on needs, and there’s a few that I follow on social media, and I just love those stories. It’s just like you said, so empowering to just see other people have been able to do it.
And so, one of the things I picked up on was that there are these trade shows, and conventions, and there was a juvenile products trade show that happens every year in Las Vegas, and it was coming up, so the timing was just such that it sort of fell into place and I saw that it was coming up, and I remember saying to my mom like, “Hey, you want to go to Vegas? Let’s just get some research here and see. Maybe we can talk to some people that will help us learn what the next step is because I certainly don’t know what the next step is.” And that was really the first step we took, was to go. They had a section of this trade show that was for inventions, so it was a kind of a discounted rate for the booth, and we just… We showed up with prototypes, like very garage-made prototypes that my mom had made, but she made a few more at that point, thinking, “Well, maybe I should start tweaking certain things if we’re really gonna make this a product that looks a little nicer.”
But I think we showed up with like a bucket of 20 prototypes and threw them on a table. We had a sign we made at Kinko’s, and it was just very homemade and just talked all day long. And I have to say one of the most memorable and amazing experiences I’ve ever had. It was just like starting to get that feedback of people saying, “Yes, this is a problem. I work in the industry. I work with car seats. I hear this a lot.” Customer service departments of car seat manufacturers saying, “We get this call all the time from people.” Really feeling like, “Oh my gosh, we’re onto something here,” is such an empowering… It was just such a cool experience to feel like, “Okay, we’re tied into a problem here that’s real and we have a solution that works,” so that was the first thing.
Kurt Elster: I think you may be the first person we’ve talked to that step one was rent a booth at a trade show to show the prototype.
Becca Davison: Totally.
Kurt Elster: And this initial prototype, was this still handmade thermoplastic?
Becca Davison: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There was a screw in it that I found in my garage. Yeah. Nothing manufactured. We didn’t have 3D prints at that point. We had no CAD design. It was just literally like we have a piece of plastic from the garage.
Kurt Elster: And what year was this?
Becca Davison: And I should say we did file… This was 2016.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Becca Davison: And I will say we did file patents. That was one of the first things we did. We were like, “Okay, we have this idea. It’s so super simple.” And that was one of our concerns is like someone else is gonna think of this, someone else is gonna see it and run with it, because clearly we don’t know what we’re doing. But we did think to file patents and I’m so glad we did, because that has been just an anchor of our success, but file patents and then basically, yeah, rent a booth and just started to see is there legs behind this. Is it something people want?
Kurt Elster: And so, at the conference with the booth, can I ask what a booth at a trade show typically costs?
Becca Davison: It might be like $2,000 or $3,000. Yeah, something like a couple thousand dollars.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Becca Davison: And this one was maybe like $500. I mean, it wasn’t nothing. It was still like, “Okay, we’re putting some money here.” But we feel like we believe in this enough to at least take a trip to Las Vegas, use some air miles, talk to some people, sort of like let’s throw a little bit of money in this.
Kurt Elster: I like the idea of going to… If the industry that you’re looking at has a Vegas trade show, and like… I don’t know that people necessarily realize Vegas is built for trade shows. If you’re gonna go to a trade show and it’s in Vegas, it’s going to be extremely convenient. It’s just… It’s what they’re set up for. And so, I just think that’s such a brilliant idea.
Becca Davison: Yeah. You know, and the world’s changed, obviously. This was 2016, so this was pre-COVID, and I think even just… I know so many other brands and businesses that have just gone straight to eCommerce, right? They figured it out, they’ve Googled it, they’ve done kind of the more background research and sort of quietly sleuthed their product development, and then they just show up one day and it’s like this eCommerce splash, and they’ve been so successful.
So, I think ours is almost like the more old-fashioned way of let’s just talk to some people, so there’s so many different ways to go about launching a product. I don’t think there’s any one right way to do it. This was just our journey and probably because my mom and I… We had fun together. It took zero convincing to get her… It was like, “Let’s go to Vegas.” “Sure, that’d be fun.” So, this was kind of how we just thought would be a fun way to dip our toe into the pond, but there’s so many channels these days, and so many ways to launch products.
Kurt Elster: So, you leave the conference and I assume this has given you confidence, this has given you validation, and you were able to connect with people in the industry who… car seat manufacturers who were saying, “Yes, you’re right. It’s a genuine problem that we hear.” So, you know that market is there. I mean, you knew it in your heart. Now you know it, like you have third-party external validation saying, “Okay, yeah. It’s real.” And so, it makes it much easier to take that risk and spend the money to go to the next step. What’s the next step?
Becca Davison: Yes. And I’ll just add to that real quick before I go to the next step. The other thing we learned that I think was really interesting is we were focused on kind of grandparents, and arthritis, and even thinking about other parents with disabilities, and cerebral palsy, and carpal tunnel, and things like that. But I think one of the things that we took away from that conference was like there’s moms with long fingernails that hate car seat buckles, that are breaking their nails, and that’s not a market that I ever anticipated, but… And then we had parents saying, “I’ve got three kids. The third one’s in the third row of the car. I’m climbing over the third row to unbuckle them in the back seat, breaking my back.” One mom, I think she was… Because this trade show had some consumers coming through it, as well. She’s like, “I’m eight months pregnant. I physically can’t even get back there to unbuckle them.” So, like siblings are trying to unbuckle, and they can’t do it, so she’s like, “This would be such a cool thing to be able to pass back to kids to unbuckle themselves.”
So, those were sort of the conversations that, like you said, got us really excited, like it’s even bigger than we thought, right? There’s more people that could really use this product. But yeah, so we walked away from that completely overwhelmed, like what’s the next step? I have no idea. Fortunately, we had actually connected with a couple of… I’ll call them manufacturers, and they’re based in the U.S., so it was kind of… There was a few different companies walking around that had manufacturing capabilities and certainly the engineering, kind of the CAD design capabilities, so those were kind of my first calls that next week was like, “Hey, let’s… Sounds like the first thing we need to do is a CAD design, then we need to get some 3D prints, let’s refine our design a little bit,” and then start to look at manufacturing, which is an injected molded kind of plastic tool that we need to start to design.
So, we started, just went through that process, probably took us eight months, almost a year of just refining the prototypes. We got very perfectionistic about it. We probably just revised that thing hundreds and hundreds of times and drove everyone completely crazy, but we were obsessed with like, “How do we make this as good as it possibly can?” Everything from getting feedback, we did a lot of research from customers, and not even customers at that point, because we weren’t selling, but just people that we had met that were willing to try our prototype, give us feedback. We added a soft over mold to the top. We wanted it to be comfortable. We added the keychain loop that people said, “We want to have a place to keep it.”
So, just a kind of iterative process of I guess product development, really, is just making sure we had the right design.
Kurt Elster: So, getting someone, so you were able to contract with a manufacturer who was able to help you develop the CAD files, so it’s one thing to go from like, “I have an idea and I have a prototype, but it’s homemade,” to, “We have a 3D file and specifications that define what this is where I could pass this to anyone, any manufacturer, who could then make it for me.” And so, that’s really the next step.
Becca Davison: Yeah. It’s like when you build a house, you need plans, like architectural plans, so to speak.
Kurt Elster: And so, you’ve got… That’s actually a good way to put it. The CAD file, that’s the architectural plans for your product. But getting tooling for even something as simple as like a small, injection molded piece of plastic, you’re still gonna spend 10 grand easy just on getting the tooling made. So, you can’t make it and then spend 10 grand on tooling and discover, “Oh, it’s not quite right.” So, that’s where you have the prototypes, which, when we say prototypes, most of the time it’s 3D printed, right?
Becca Davison: Yes. Which is incredible. I can’t imagine developing a product before 3D printing became so ubiquitous.
Kurt Elster: It really changes things.
Becca Davison: Totally.
Kurt Elster: I did not realize how inexpensive and accessible 3D printers became, but we got one as a gift last year. It was less than $200. And my 10-year-old has now mastered it and just keeps churning out-
Becca Davison: It’s so cool. I think it unlocks for kids, especially, like it unlocks that part of your brain to just start trying things and be able to feel it and touch it.
Kurt Elster: He started selling the prints at school. It’s unlocked entrepreneurship for a 10-year-old.
Becca Davison: That’s amazing! Congrats to your son.
Kurt Elster: I know. I’m really thrilled with it. But yeah, even having like 3D printing, and obviously the 3D printer that a manufacturer would use, a little nicer than what’s in my basement.
Becca Davison: Little bit.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and like they can do multiple colors, and materials, and…
Becca Davison: Yeah. Well, and that’s kind of my next point, is that it’s still really difficult to… You know, there were elements of our product, like you said, it’s so simple, but it’s like it has to flex in certain places, but we don’t want it to break, so it’s like what’s the right thickness there? We wanted that over mold on the top, which ended up requiring a whole separate mold to be able to put that kind of grippy, rubber-like material on the top of it, so there was a surprising amount of complexity in the design for such a simple product. And 3D printing can get you pretty far, but I still remember, you’re right. That tooling investment is such a leap of faith, because it’s like… We haven’t been able to totally test the exact materials that we’ll be making it from. So, you kind of do just have to take that leap of faith at some point.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Because it isn’t… The injection molding is different from 3D printing, which is material deposit, where we’re like layer, layer, layer, and it makes it… it could be brittle. And especially with like this is a very flexy device.
Becca Davison: The flexibility. Yeah. It was so tough.
Kurt Elster: So, yeah, you’re right, even in 3D printing it, your prototype, once you have your actual one it’s like until you actually manufacture that, anybody’s guess if it’s gonna operate exactly like you hoped. So, did it? Did it work?
Becca Davison: It did, and I feel like there’s so much luck in everybody’s story, but there’s several points in our story and journey that I just feel like things fell into place, and this is one of them. Yes, it works great. We were really happy with it. We had a little bit of a setback with like we were gonna use polypropylene, and then that ended up being a little bit too bendy, which is what those like shower cap bottles and things are often made with that really thin plastic, so we had to change to use a different kind of plastic, so it wasn’t like it was smooth sailing, but definitely very fortunate that the tooling worked. We didn’t have to reinvest. But it was a sizable investment, especially because we were doing it in the U.S., too, which was a thoughtful decision. We like to obviously support U.S. manufacturing. We had a great partner here, but things are a bit more expensive.
We also were nervous about buying such high volumes, because the part’s so lightweight, to do it overseas it’s like you spend less money on tooling, but then you’ve gotta buy like an entire freight ocean ship full of them to get the cost where you want it, so it made a lot of sense for us to start here in the U.S.
Kurt Elster: What gave you the faith to spend the money on that initial run? Because like by the time we’re into, “All right, let’s pull the trigger on actually manufacturing and in three months I’m gonna have a garage full of these things,” I’ve spoken to people in the past. It’s anywhere from 10 to 100 grand you’ll have spent, like tens of thousands are gone here, non-trivial. What was the thing that made you feel that it was okay to take that risk?
Becca Davison: So, we did do a Kickstarter campaign in 2017, so we were pretty far along the process of having… We had done 3D prints, we were feeling happy with it, and that was to your point, exactly, it was like, “First of all, where are we gonna get this money?” And secondly was like, “Are we sure about this?” My mom and I both are bad decision makers and we second guess, triple guess things a million times, so it was like, “Let’s do Kickstarter.” And that’s a really whole beast in and of itself, is trying to run a successful Kickstarter, and again, there are successful Kickstarter campaigns I’ve seen, and we were successful. We got funded. But in retrospect, it was just a really, really stressful time and requires a lot of effort and kind of PR, and that whole effort that I think I probably underestimated how much goes into that.
But we did that and that really helped us, so kind of to share our story, to kind of start to create those early videos, and photos, and have that resonate with people, and have some kind of big media people that we were able to talk to help us spread the word on that, that definitely gave us that validation, like, “Okay, we’ve now gone to two different forums, one being a little bit more industry focused, and this one, Kickstarter kind of being more consumer focused, and we’re feeling like we’re just getting a lot of encouragement and a lot of take my money kind of comments. We’re onto something here.”
So, we thought, “We’re gonna invest.” And you’re right. It does… To do the tooling, you have to plop down a bunch of money. But I would say we tried to be as scrappy as we… I mean, if you haven’t already gotten my vibe here of us wheeling into trade shows with our plastic prototypes, everything we’ve done has been very scrappy, especially in the early days, because we didn’t have investors. We didn’t want to take out a bunch of loans. We were just trying to bootstrap as much as we could. But yeah, that gave us the confidence to go forward.
Kurt Elster: And so, you started the… To offset some of the risk, to both validate it and get the cashflow for that initial manufacturing run, you did a Kickstarter and the Kickstarter showed, “Hey, here’s the prototypes,” and explains it in great detail and makes it clear, “Hey, this is a thing we are ready to manufacture and pull the trigger on.” And you sought… the goal was $10,000. You raised $12,800 from 343 backers in 2017. Congratulations.
Becca Davison: Thanks.
Kurt Elster: It got featured in… Man, a dozen or more blogs and publications. And so, with Kickstarter, I think the thing that people underestimate with Kickstarter is this thought of like, “Oh, well, if I build it and it’s just a great enough idea, if I can just communicate through what’s essentially a sales page on Kickstarter, that we’ll raise the money.” And the reality is-
Becca Davison: It’s crickets.
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Becca Davison: Yeah. It’s exactly it. And I think that’s… I definitely underestimated that, so here I was kind of spending day in, day out, also working full-time, by the way. I was doing this all kind of as a side hustle.
Kurt Elster: Oh, man.
Becca Davison: And for spending so much time on the product, and the manufacturing, all of that, and then realized once we launched this Kickstarter it’s like, “Oh, I gotta shift my entire focus right now to PR and contacting media.” It was like, “Whoa, I didn’t anticipate that I would have to basically bring my own people over to the platform.” Which totally makes sense. This was just again me learning by trial by error. So, yeah, it was a hustle. It was like and then you’ve got this sort of like dripping time clock of 30 days or whatever that you have to meet your goal. It’s all or nothing. I was like, “Oh my gosh, we’ve gotta…” So, that just became like a really stressful 28-day window of just farming myself out to so many… anybody I could talk to. Press, Facebook, shamelessly hitting up friends on Facebook, all of the above to get some attention on that.
So, I’m still eternally grateful for those 300 or so people for bearing with us, because I know it’s tough, right? With Kickstarter, especially with baby products, you’ve got a kid, you’ve got a problem, we’re sort of dangling this product idea in front of you, but you’re not gonna get it for a few more months and this is our first time doing this, so I’m sure people were like, “You guys don’t know what you’re doing.” And we ended up delivering I think like a month or two late, which by Kickstarter terms is pretty good.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I was gonna say that’s well within the range of great experience on Kickstarter.
Becca Davison: Yeah. Exactly. I don’t think we had anybody that was too upset on Kickstarter the way it ended up, but all that to say those people were incredibly patient, and supportive, and still… There’s a few of them that still comment on our social posts, and I even know their names. Some of them it’s like I remember those early backers, right? Because they’re like the first people that are not related to you that are giving you money out of their wallet to support your idea. It’s tremendous.
Kurt Elster: So, in 2016 you have this idea. By 2017, you’ve got a prototype and a successful Kickstarter to make it happen. That’s pretty good. From idea to business in a year.
Becca Davison: Yeah. We were… I mean, again, this product, it’s not… It’s fairly simple, right? In and of itself. It’s just getting the nuance of it, and getting the materials, and we were fortunate like I said to find a good manufacturing partner, so we had… I think the Kickstarter was in February and I think we were planning to deliver over the summer, and I think we shipped by September, I think. I want to say. I think October.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It was estimated delivery August 2017 and then September they were delivered.
Becca Davison: Okay, August. Yeah. Something like that.
Kurt Elster: And so, I have a key cap set I bought off Kickstarter and it was almost two years to get some keyboard key caps. Not even a whole keyboard. Just the key caps.
Becca Davison: Yes. I know. I’ve had similar experiences and especially with technology products.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely.
Becca Davison: I think I ordered a baby monitor and I think it was like my daughter was out of her crib by the time they were ready to ship.
Kurt Elster: And that’s one of the tough parts about baby and child products.
Becca Davison: Yes. I think as a category it’s a really tough category for Kickstarter. I think. Because there is that finite time you need it, like you need it now.
Kurt Elster: Well, and I think larger than that, it’s a tough category in terms of customer lifetime value. We’ve had on this show a few times Beav Brodie from Tactical Baby Gear and they sell diaper bags.
Becca Davison: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And he’s mentioned that, that that’s the thing people don’t necessarily realize about getting into that category, is once the child grows up, you’ve lost the parent as a customer unless you can get word of mouth, or get them to sell, or get them to buy as gifts.
Becca Davison: Yeah. And I think that’s also one of the hidden successes of our product is that different than an infant-specific bottle or something, kids are in car seats till they’re… in the five-point harness, they’re in there till they’re five, six, which is a pretty good lifespan, and then you’ve got siblings, so you’ve got kind of each family has a longer I think time period where they can use this product, and then you’ve got grandparents, right? That come back and are taking care of their kids, and then you’ve got… Yeah, as you said, gifts, baby showers, things like that, so we’ve been fortunate I think to feel like it’s of the baby products, we’ve got a pretty good window there. But you’re right, it’s a difficult category.
And it is somewhat niche, right? We’ve also sort of reflected on that many, many times as we go refine our marketing plans, is like this can be a bit niche, and I think that was one thing that was brought up pretty heavily on Shark Tank even that Kevin mentioned, was you guys, who needs this? Is this a super, super specific thing? And I think our goal has been to just share and educate that it’s actually not quite as niche as it might appear at first glance. There is actually… I do believe that there’s someone in every family that has kids that would really love to use our product and that potentially needs our product.
Kurt Elster: No, it seems like a good product, and you’re right, hearing you talk through it, it suddenly becomes apparent that this is… It’s more than just people with arthritis. It really expands to a larger category and it’s just because of the design of the way a buckle and a five-point harness works.
Becca Davison: Sure. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: In a child’s seat, anyway. You mentioned Shark Tank. Tell me about your Shark Tank experience.
Becca Davison: Oh, gosh. Well, this was something that we thought fun memories of this business, let’s go for it. It was a goal for our business for a very long time, even from the beginning, and people that saw us from that very first trade show and said, “You guys need to go on Shark Tank,” and we’re like, “We will someday.” So, we auditioned twice, two consecutive years. So, one year we actually flew to New York. We were visiting some relatives out there and we got in line at 5:00 AM, met some equally crazy people just like us, and pitched, and went through the process, and it didn’t go anywhere, and I’m very grateful that we sort of… We went back that next year.
I was skeptical the next year and my mom was like, “Come on, let’s go. Let’s try again.” And we went to Dallas the following year and it was just great. And so much had happened in our business over that year. You know, our revenue had at least doubled. We had patents that were issued. We had retailers we were working with. So much I think helped position us to be a much stronger candidate for the show. But it was tremendous, right? And my mom was there, my daughter was there. I remember the show was interested in having my daughter, and she was three at the time, and I was like, “Oh my…” If I’m not already stressed enough, I have to manage the mood and the demeanor of a three-year-old on national television. That was… It was stressful, but what an incredible memory to have-
Kurt Elster: I wouldn’t risk it.
Becca Davison: Right, I was sort of like, “Can we just do a doll?”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I remember what my three-year-old’s like. I’m like-
Becca Davison: Right?
Kurt Elster: They are mercurial at best.
Becca Davison: Yes. Yes. But fortunately, she was kind of… She didn’t really understand it, obviously, but she kind of was excited, and I think she knew it was important to her mom and her grandma, and she did fantastic. And then we got out there and they’re like, “Can she have a speaking role? Can she say a couple things?” And I’m like, “You guys are gonna kill me.” The stress level. But she did so well, so the whole experience of being out there with three generations was just… It’s such a special memory and the experience was just tremendous. I think everyone that works on that show, including the sharks, are wonderful. They’re very supportive. I know they like to be sort of sharky on TV, but I really got the sense that everybody out there from beginning to end cares about entrepreneurs, and wants them to succeed, so it was just thrilling. Just the absolute… One of the coolest experiences in my life.
Kurt Elster: What was the result? What was the reception?
Becca Davison: Yeah. Well, it was great. We, as you said, managed to get offers from all five, which is nuts. We have a couple of them pairing off, so we had three offers on the table from the five sharks, and I’m just so grateful that they really understood that this is a product that the world needs and that has been well received, and so just again super validating. We were lucky to… We accepted a deal on screen with Lori and Mark. We didn’t end up closing the deal, just for kind of some due diligence stuff. It felt like it wasn’t gonna be the right partnership for either side, but that show has been tremendous for us. I attribute so, so, so much of our success and sales to really just what followed. I mean, just from the opportunities, we rolled out to 2,600 Walmart stores shortly after. We launched on Target.com. We’re in Amazon’s Launchpad program. We’re like a top five in their Shark Tank collection.
Things just have really taken off and I’m so, so grateful for the opportunity because I think our product is one that you look at it, or even you see it, it’s like, “What is this? I don’t really get it.” But I think that the way we were able to present on the show, when people hear it and they sort of see the problem, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, yes. That’s the thing I struggle with every week that I just curse about and never knew that there was a better way, right?” And so, they see it, and they buy it, and so every time a Shark Tank airs, it re-aired several times, and every time we see this crazy spike in sales I’m like Googling, like, “Did we just air on Shark Tank?” And usually, a friend or so texts me and is like, “Your rerun was on last night.”
So, it’s just… It’s been a huge, huge tailwind for us to grow.
Kurt Elster: Have you tried setting up a Shark Tank landing page on your Shopify store?
Becca Davison: That’s an idea, I guess, just… I mean, I assume people Google us and find our Shopify store. But you think like a specific landing page?
Kurt Elster: If you… So, I’ll try this right now on Google. If I type in UnbuckleMe it will autocomplete with UnbuckleMe Shark Tank, Shark Tank episode, Shark Tank pitch, and so plenty of blogs and businesses rely on that, and they’ll write recaps, reviews, follow ups about businesses on Shark Tank. You can capture that traffic if you make a dedicated landing page on your site and you call it like UnbuckleMe, our Shark Tank experience, 2022 update.
Becca Davison: Yes. Kind of the SEO. Yeah, I love that. That’s actually a great idea.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Becca Davison: I should do that. Thank you.
Kurt Elster: And then obviously you’re like, “Here’s a link.” You can also check out the product here.
Becca Davison: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it’s just an easy win if you have that wonderful Shark Tank opportunity under your belt.
Becca Davison: That’s a great suggestion. Yes. And it’s funny that yeah, there are so many sites that have written about us, and most of them have gotten it right, but there is one site out there that… I think it’s fairly highly ranked, that has a completely fabricated story that is not actually the right story, so it’s funny what the internet runs with, but it’s all good.
Kurt Elster: Interesting. So, you had the Shark Tank success. You were able to get into, and that unlocked a lot of doors. What do you think… What other marketing channels and marketing strategies, tactics, helped you early on? Just it’s so tough to get… As you found with Kickstarter, it’s so tough to initially get that awareness out there and get people to care.
Becca Davison: Yes. It is. It’s a great question. You know, so we set up a website early on. I will say it wasn’t Shopify and I wish it was. That was one early hiccup that we struggled with. I think our website could have been a lot more seamless.
Kurt Elster: What was it on?
Becca Davison: I shouldn’t say, right?
Kurt Elster: What was it on?
Becca Davison: We set up a WordPress site.
Sound Board Clip: Eww!
Becca Davison: And I think WordPress works really well for so many people, but for… We actually had the WordPress site when our Shark Tank episode aired, which… It crashed and it’s probably my fault, from terrible IT architecture, so I’ll take the blame on that. But we moved over to Shopify after Shark Tank, and it’s been great. Really one of those kick yourself moments of like, “Why haven’t we been doing this the whole time?” But yes, Shopify has been a great channel for us. We, last year and the year before, did a lot of Facebook ads, a lot of retargeting around the Shark Tank experience using imagery and things like that, credibility certainly, so that’s been great.
I mean, we’ve been picked up by like… We were on Good Morning America, we’re on BuzzFeed lists, like it seems like all the time we’ve been on four or five, and I love it. Those editors, I need to just send them like a huge plant gift or something.
Kurt Elster: And you didn’t do anything to get on those lists. It just happened.
Becca Davison: No. Those lists, we haven’t done anything. Those just… I think they just find us through… I mean, I assume through Shark Tank. I don’t know how else they would be finding us. Because a lot of the products on there are Shark Tank products. I think they must find… Somebody on there has watched the episode and is a big fan. I don’t know. But if you’re listening, thank you. I’m so, so grateful. But those have been big.
We also have gone the retail route, as well, just because I feel like car seats are a category where people like to shop in person. Again, thinking kind of through the pre-COVID lens, or post-COVID lens. I kind of like to buy car seats in person because you want to touch them, feel them, they’re big, they’re bulky, you want to see how they work, so I feel like we need to be selling everywhere where car seats are sold, and so that’s Target, that’s Walmart, that’s Buy Buy Baby, some of those big retailers, and those have been really, really great relationships for us.
I love those because customer acquisition can be expensive, so retail… I don’t have to do as much of the heavy lifting on that, so that’s kind of been… I’ve been trying to spread the spaghetti out, throw spaghetti at the wall, see what sticks kind of approach.
Kurt Elster: What do you think you’re gonna try next?
Becca Davison: Well, I want to expand our product line. I think that’s been a kind of a back of my mind what’s next for us. So, we do have a new product we’re working on and that’s taking a lot of my time right now. It’s actually… It’s related to kind of kids and car seats, but it’s a very different type of product. It’s not a plastic manufactured product, so it requires new skills, kind of new talent of people that I can find to help me with new capabilities, so we’re really excited about that.
Yeah, just trying to continue to spread the word really as much as we can. I love the car seat technician space, as well. That’s been a really interesting… I don’t know if I’d call it a market, but I became certified as a child passenger safety technician, and that’s actually a group of people that have a certification that know a lot about how to install car seats, how they work, safety information, and so that’s been a really cool kind of volunteer-based way that we’ve been able to just share it with everyone. I think most of them know about our product and they’re the ones that are working in school districts, and fire stations, and hospitals, and educating the community around car seats, and so for them to know about our product and when they see on the ground, “Hey, there’s somebody here that’s having trouble with that buckle,” they can right away refer them to a solution for that problem.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, in itself, that becomes a safety issue. Isn’t it the case that most car seats are installed improperly?
Becca Davison: It is the case, unfortunately. I think it’s getting better. I think there’s a lot of advocates I see on social media that I think are doing really, really wonderful work in telling people about how to install your car seat more safely. There’s courses out there. Michelle Pratt at Safe in the Seat, I’ll just give her a shout out because I think she’s phenomenal and she’s doing such incredible work to tell people and to educate parents on how to better install their car seat, so I think it's improving, but yes, for anyone listening if you’ve got kids, make sure your car seat’s installed properly and try to find a CPST to help you in your community if you need help.
Kurt Elster: I will include a link to Safe in the Seat. On the topic of resources, were there any resources that helped you on your entrepreneurial journey? This was your first time doing this.
Becca Davison: Yep. Yep. I mean, certainly there’s tools, right? We’ve used different email platforms. Klaviyo is really great. We jumped onto SMS marketing recently and that’s been really cool to explore. We’re using Attentive for that. Yeah, I think the communities that I’ve been able to be a part of I’m super grateful for, so there’s Facebook communities and groups of other entrepreneurs, whether it’s Shark Tank entrepreneurs, or even other parent entrepreneurs. I’m part of a kind of a small Facebook community that we hop on, I mean, every day there’s a thread about a different topic, and I think just that sense of mutual support, and connectivity, and they’ve given me ideas that I’ve run with that have been hugely helpful and hopefully I’ve done the same, so… I don’t know. I feel like the world in some ways, especially for entrepreneurs, has just gotten so much more supportive, and there’s just so much more conversation and dialogue, and you’re part of that as well, right? Podcasts like this, it’s just great. It’s super encouraging for people like I was a few years ago and needed all that help.
Kurt Elster: That makes my day, because that has always been my why. That has always been the driving focus is can we enable entrepreneurship, and it is… So far, I’ve been able to do it, and so I’m proud of it. I’m happy to hear you say it.
Becca Davison: Yeah. It’s really true. I mean, I want people to know if they’re listening to this, anything is possible. I know everybody says that, like anything’s possible, but like it really is. You can figure it out. I was just on a call yesterday with somebody who was kind of struggling and thinking about hiring different people that were selling her on different things. I’m like, “You can do this. You can.” You just kind of need the motivation and a little bit of resourcefulness, but anybody can do it.
Kurt Elster: You know, I think we’ll go out on that. It’s so positive and encouraging and I’ve greatly enjoyed having you, but-
Becca Davison: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: If I wanted to get my own UnbuckleMe, where do I go?
Becca Davison: You can go to our website, UnbuckleMe.com. You can go to Amazon and find us there. We’re on Target.com, Walmart.com, Buy Buy Baby.
Kurt Elster: But lo’ and behold, if you buy from UnbuckleMe.com direct, A, you save her from having to pay the Jeff Bezos tax, and we have a coupon code here. 15% off with code PODCAST15.
Becca Davison: Yes. Enjoy. And we’ve got some other stuff on there, as well. We’ve added some other kind of kids travel-related products.
Kurt Elster: Oh, very nice. Yeah. We’ve got our cross-sells and upsells going, it sounds like.
Becca Davison: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Gotta increase that average order value.
Becca Davison: Yes. And a lot of the stuff we have on there, so far it’s not… Like I said, we’re working on a new product, but a lot of it is just other stuff that other friends of mine, or other entrepreneurs, or small businesses, a lot of stuff that we kind of re-sell with them, so you’re also supporting many other small businesses with your purchase.
Kurt Elster: Becca Davison, UnbuckleMe.com, thank you so much.
Becca Davison: Thank you.