Julie Carty is from a family of entrepreneurs, so she’s been interested in starting a business since she was little. But it wasn’t until she had a little one herself that an idea hit her.
As a sleep-deprived new mom, Julie started to brainstorm how she could make nighttime breastfeedings a little better. “I hated my lighting setup at home, and I had the ‘best’ bedside table lights,” says Julie, who adds that she found these lights either too dim or too bright. She also noticed that the lights made it hard for her, her baby, and her husband, to fall asleep afterward.
Julie decided she wanted to make a soft, directional light designed to help babies and parents see during night feedings. She spent two and a half years developing LatchLight, a product that moms could trust. Here’s what went into the product’s design and launch.
Identifying the needs
Julie noticed a few challenges with nighttime feedings that she thought a better light could solve. For example, she wanted a light that illuminated only her baby’s latch, not the entire room. She also wanted a light that was wearable and portable, so she could feed in different places, whether it was in the baby’s room or on the couch.
“I also wanted something that I didn’t need another light to turn on to find it because that would defeat the purpose, so that’s where we came up with the glow-in-the-dark feature,” Julie says.
Finding freelance designers and a manufacturer
Creating LatchLight was uncharted territory for Julie. “I’ve never designed a product or anything from scratch,” she shares. She started with a drawing on a napkin and then made a homemade prototype by carving a silicone kid spoon.
Julie then hired freelancers on Upwork to help her translate her vision to a three-dimensional computer-aided design (3D CAD) rendering, and later a prototype. Julie refined her prototypes over nine iterations before she felt confident enough to give it to new mothers and lactation consultants for feedback.
With a final prototype, Julie was ready to manufacture. She vetted manufacturers extensively. “Because of the sensitivity of this product, we needed to make sure that these factories were regulated and they met the certifications and the requirements to actually manufacture a baby product,” Julie says.
Marketing to moms and hospitals
Despite a background in business-to-business (B2B) sales, transitioning to direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales was a new challenge for Julie. She leveraged social media and word of mouth to connect with her audience.
She even started selling to hospital gift shops. “I felt instantly more comfortable going back to my roots of medical sales, and I do see this fitting within the health care market,” Julie says.
Collaborating with mommy influencers and attending trade shows further helped LatchLight find its footing in both markets. It’s now also sold at retailer Buy Buy Baby.
Deciding when to launch a new product
Now that Julie has LatchLight out there, she says her next challenge is figuring out what product to launch next and when. She already has started working on a second version of LatchLight. “ I have other product ideas, and so it’s a matter of, ‘OK, at what point do I start working on those designs and manufacturing processes,’” Julie says.
To learn more about LatchLight’s product development process, listen to the full interview on Shopify Masters.
