A weekend can help start a baby box business

When Kate Compton Barr met a group of her girlfriends in Sedona, Arizona seven years ago, she never imagined she would emerge from a weekend getaway as a company founder.

While there she was six months pregnant with her first child, she heard her friend Amber Crocker describe how she designed and created the American Finnish Cardboard Baby Box.

“I was basically the founder of the company four days later, and we were planning to launch and I was waist deep in ownership and technology transfer and trademarks,” said Barr, who has served the academic innovation center since January. As a behavioral scientist.

“It’s one of those situations where I don’t know what it takes to do it at first. It was me, Amber and our friend Lauren (Hughey), and we just went to meet him. He’s gone casually.

Pip & Grow was the result of that weekend and Crocker’s first venture. While none of the original co-founders are actively involved in day-to-day operations, the business continues to fulfill its mission under new leadership by producing and selling strong, environmentally friendly cardboard boxes that help reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome.

Given its humble beginnings, the basic nature of the prototype, and the co-founders’ general lack of business experience, it’s a Peep and Grow phenomenon.

Barr, a child welfare specialist, said Crocker worked on the project for a year or two while her full-time job at UM was co-founding the University of Michigan Medical Associates. Kroeker received funding from UM to develop the baby box, a popular item in Finland since the 1930s.

The example shows Crocker that her friends in Sedona weren’t exactly encouraging.

“It’s like any other prototype,” Barr said. “It was very dull looking, but extremely strong and passed all the tests. But she didn’t know what to do.”

Neither did at the time, but Barr credits her experience as a member of the Behavioral Sciences Group at UM’s Center for Health Communication Research from 2009-14.

At Barr’s suggestion, they added three rules for putting the baby in the crate on the headboard: place the baby on his back, clear the crate of any toys or blankets, and make sure the baby is alone in the crate. .

The company’s original name was supposed to be Safe Baby Company, but Barr knew it was already trademarked. After a long weekend brainstorming session, they came up with Pip and Grow.

“It’s what chicks do when they hatch from the egg,” she said. “So we thought about the concept of a nest, and this box is like a nest for your child, so you snap and the box grows with you.

“The baby can sleep in different positions for a while. In my family, my baby is a little higher and turned into a rocket ship and my baby’s reading area because what child doesn’t like a box?

Many other decisions, including where the box, mattresses and sheets are manufactured, are deliberate when learning to fly at a certain level.

“One of our business philosophies was about people, planet and profit,” Barr said. “Part of the people were manufacturing the boxes and all the jobs in the communities that they did so well. Our singular goal was to support healthy kids, and healthy kids grow up in safe, stable, prosperous families, which means jobs.”

The boxes are made in Flint, Michigan. The sheets came from a company in Barr’s home state of North Carolina, and the mattresses came from a company outside of Atlanta. Pip & Grow was originally intended to be a direct-to-consumer business with a wholesale component, but Barr and her partners quickly realized that wholesalers were their primary customers.

In the first year, 500-600 boxes were sold. In the year By the time Barr stepped down as CEO in 2021, the company was selling several thousand a year.

“It took a while,” she said. “We didn’t know what we were doing. It took a while to figure out how to reach our audience. But once we found an audience, we found ourselves very busy.

The boxes are all the same size and are meant to fit a baby up to 4-6 months old. They are 31 inches long, 19 inches wide at the base, and 21 inches wide at the top for easy stacking.

Not even a year out from Peep and Grow, she looks back fondly on her bar experience and how it helped shape her professionally.

“In many ways, those years were on me,” she says. “I can’t tell you how many rooms I’ve sat in that are filled with people who worry me the most. CEOs of large companies, politicians or investors, and at some point, I had to overcome myself. I had to learn how to speak in public, learn how to express myself in the media and be comfortable with that and present myself with confidence.

One of her last decisions as CEO before she left was to put the entire organization on paid leave for August 2021. Although this brand is expensive, it received insight from Pip & Grow Partners and was included as part of a Forbes magazine article.

Following the Forbes exposure, Barr said she was inundated with more than 100 applications to work at Pipe & Grow. It wasn’t an easy decision to leave the company she helped grow, but she has no regrets.

“During those years, I learned who I was and where I was willing to be flexible and where I held boundaries,” she said. “Ultimately, one of the boundaries I had to find for myself was that I needed to be more with my family, and my creative energy had taken us so far that it was time to turn it around.”

The company is now led by Pip & Grow’s former chief marketing officer, Sarah Now, and Barr has returned to UM to work with Academic Innovation’s educational technology tools like Ecoc and Tandem.

In September, Barr and her girlfriends will gather in Charleston, South Carolina, for another meeting. There’s no telling what’s to come.

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