Business Opportunities Weblog

January 11, 2006 by Dane Carlson | 3 Comments

USA Today:

If you’ve given birth or adopted in the past 10 years, chances are you know what a Boppy is. And more important, how to use it.

If you haven’t, well, read on. Because this is the story of a woman who came up with one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” ideas — a simple pillow stuffed with foam — and turned it into a multimillion-dollar business. She now has the No. 1 baby product in the country, according to American Baby magazine.

Susan Brown had already decided she was going to quit her day job when she invented the Boppy, almost accidentally. Her daughter’s day care center asked parents to bring in pillows to prop up infants who couldn’t sit up on their own. Brown came up with a C-shaped pillow in one night.

Seventeen years later, the basic design hasn’t changed.

“It’s just the perfect pillow for just about everything,” says Judy Nolte, editor of American Baby, whose readers have named Boppy the most invaluable product for new moms four consecutive years. “I think that mothers are very wise to select it as their favorite product. It fills a need that nobody realized was there.”

In fact, Boppy’s fans love it because it does a job it never was intended for: It helps support babies while breast-feeding, a job that can be taxing on exhausted new moms’ backs, arms and other areas.

“Now it’s almost embarrassing to admit, but when people started using it for breast-feeding, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. Of course,’ ” Brown, 51, says.

In Ideas, Profiles | 3 Comments