PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — A Chester County mom has birthed a new business after having a hard time bottle-feeding one of her own babies, offering a cute solution to a serious problem many new moms face.
“When I had my son Blake, he was a breastfed baby and we had a really hard time with getting him to take a bottle,” said Julianne Gardner, owner of Bottimals.
The first time Blake refused breast milk in a bottle, Gardner was about to get her first post-partum haircut.
“Just trying to feel like myself again,” she said.
While she was in the salon chair, her husband called.
“My hair was soaking wet and he calls me. I can hear the baby screaming in the background and he said, ‘You have to come home. He won’t take the bottle,'” she recalled.
She soon realized bottle refusal was common, forcing some moms to even quit their jobs.
“That really creates a vicious cycle of stress for a family,” Gardner said.
So she started to search for a solution,
“I worked in research for 13 years. I have a degree in biology,” she said.
She said there’s research that shows the scent of mom elicits the sucking reflex in babies.
And that was the basis for Bottimals, a bottle combined with an animal lovie that has a heart-shaped pad.
“So mom wears it in her bra to actually absorb the scent of her mammary glands,” she said.
When another caregiver feeds the baby, a piece of mom is there.
“You put the pad with mom’s scent in the pocket of the levy, and then it just slides onto the bottle to keep mom’s scent close to the baby,” she explained.
Baby also has a cute stuffed animal for company.
“They can touch it, they can feel it. Babies love sensory objects,” Gardner said.
Gardner launched Bottimals this past June. She has a website and sells the product for $29.99 in 15+ stores.
She said as she was building her biz, she reached out to other baby product entrepreneurs on Linked In and Instagram.
“And I can’t tell you how many people I actually heard back from who were willing to talk to me for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, just to help me get to that next step,” she said.
She’s also grateful for strangers like Maddy Thomford, who tested the product after seeing Julianne’s post on Facebook.
Maddy tried it with her daughter Charlotte the first time she left her then six-month-old with a bottle and Grandma.
“The combination of having that scent, I think of me, and knowing like, okay, this is someone I’m comfortable with. She did great,” said Thomford.
Gardner runs the Bottimals business out of her house in Phoenixville, doing most of her work when her two young kids are sleeping.
“Really, any time that I can fit it into our schedules, so I can still be a mom at the same time,” Gardner added.
Gardner said Bottimals can also be great for any baby who gets distracted while drinking a bottle or just doesn’t seem to want to finish for some reason.
Right now, she has just the bunny Bottimal but said she plans to expand to other animals in the near future.
For more information, visit Bottimals.com.
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