More Than A Great Idea
Indianapolis Business Journal:
Kathy Osborn has faced formidable challenges, but one especially difficult for the 42-year-old first-time mom: how to quiet her colicky son Harper when he awoke crying every night.
A music lover, Osborn was certain she could find a musical mobile that would play a variety of soothing songs long enough to lull him back to the land of nod. She was wrong.
After searching brick-and-mortar and Internet stores, Osborn found mobiles that played mechanical-sounding tunes for just a few minutes before needing to be rewound—an act that inevitably awakened Harper just as he was dozing off.
The answer for Osborn was to invent a baby mobile that not only interfaces with an iPod or other media player but also projects soothing visual images onto a crib-mounted screen.
Osborn’s idea proved so revolutionary that Whirlpool Brand selected her as one of five winners of their 2006 Whirlpool Brand Mother of Invention Grant contest.
Her prize included a $5,000 grant to further develop her product and a two-day “business boot camp” at Whirlpool’s Benton Harbor, Mich., headquarters, where she learned from company experts and other mompreneurs like Baby Einstein creator Julie Aigner-Clark.
Because there are myriad ways of getting a product to market, Osborn is hopeful that in her case she can enter into a licensing agreement with a major manufacturer that will give her input into the product design.
Typically the licensing agreement pays the inventor a percentage of sales—from 1 percent to 10 percent.
Even though her patent is still pending, Osborn has learned that if a major manufacturer thinks you have a viable product, they want to develop a relationship early on. She’s hopeful that in a year or two her baby mobile will be on the shelves at Babies R Us, Target and other stores.
Photo by Robin Jerstad.
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