Ken DeCoster
Rockford Register Star, Ill.
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) As Ken DeCoster reports, “The Totes Babies Car Seat Carrier has been on the market since 2018 and is designed to make shopping with an infant easy, interactive and hands free.”
Rockford
A father-daughter team of entrepreneurs from Rockford struck a deal on national television.
Stanley Valiulis, 63, and Lindsey Fleischhauer, 38, pitched their Totes Babies Car Seat Carrier on an episode of the ABC show “Shark Tank” that aired Friday on WTVO.
Valiulis and Fleischhauer accepted celebrity panelist Lori Greiner’s offer to invest $100,000 in their product in exchange for a 25% stake in their company.
Panelists Robert Herjavec and Daniel Lubetzky also made offers that were ultimately rejected.
“She has done a lot of baby products and I think that’s one of the reasons why we decided to go with her,” Fleischhauer said of Greiner’s offer. “I feel emotionally drained because we’ve been working on this for almost a year. We really enjoyed all of the sharks. They were all amazing.”
The celebrity panel is comprised of self-made multimillionaires and billionaires who give entrepreneurs the chance to pitch their ideas with hopes of winning investment from at least one of the sharks.
The episode was taped in Las Vegas in August, said Fleischhauer, a 2000 Guilford High School graduate and mother of five who now lives in Naperville with her husband, Mark.
“My husband kind of forced us to apply to be on the show,” Fleischhauer said. “It was completely out of our comfort zone. Even though I was a theater major, I’m not good at that type of stuff.”
The Totes Babies Car Seat Carrier has been on the market since 2018 and is designed to make shopping with an infant easy, interactive and hands free.
Fleischhauer and Valiulis came up with the concept for a hammock-style device that allows a parent to lay the carrier over the shopping cart, place the car seat in and strap the car seat down. Baby is safe and there’s still plenty of room for items to be placed in the cart.
About 8,000 of the car seat carriers have been sold since the product hit the market. The carriers are available at totesbabies.com Amazon, Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond and Buy Buy Baby.
Valiulis, a longtime local businessman and inventor, holds more than 40 patents. He is the former CEO of Rockford-based Southern Imperial Inc., which manufactures display hooks, shelf dividers, sign holders and other store fixtures and retail displays.
“We want to make Totes Babies a household name,” Fleischhauer said. “We want to grow the company and we have other products in the works that my dad and I have been working on for a couple of years. We also hope our (TV) appearance will inspire other people to follow their dreams.”
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