After six years of hard work and enormous personal sacrifice, Bare Air-free baby bottles are finally making it to stores. I almost feel like I went thru contractions, had the baby and celebrated a 6th year anniversary all at the same time.
Nobody said it would be easy!
We made arrangements with two friends to help me and my husband unload our first container with hundreds of cartons full of Bare baby bottles. To my dismay, our friends cancelled at the last minute, so it was only the two of us and thousands of baby bottles that needed to be unloaded within a two hour window. The truck was so long it could hardly fit in our narrow parking lot. After cutting the “bolt” locking the back door of the trailer with a bolt cutter, the driver told us to stand back as he swung open one of two “barn” doors, revealing cartons stacked floor to ceiling. I climbed inside the trailer and started handing cartons, one by one, to my husband on the ground who carried them inside our office/warehouse. This load was only a partial amount of bottles for the nationwide launch in stores on Feb 1st and we were elated to finally see proof that our dream was really happening…..bringing Bare to new moms and babies across the USA. After 2 hours, my arms, legs, abdomen and pretty much every part of my body felt like jello!! and all I could think about was a vacation. There was no time to even celebrate, much less a vacation as hubby jumped into our minivan and drove to the printer in New Jersey to pick up 80,000 postcards for a Bare Air-free promotion at baby shower registries.
Our in-store presence incorporates a really cool lenticular display so customers can see how the nipple and air-plug move in synergy. The various display components needed to be picked up at three different vendors. Our past two weekends were spent packing 80,000 postcards into 500 individually shipped cartons and assembling hundreds of displays with barely any room to move inside our office. Meanwhile, I’m editing an instructional video for salespeople so they can explain all of Bare’s benefits to moms in stores. When you’re a small company with big dreams, you have to be hands-on and stretch every dollar, so we do most of the work ourselves, working within a tight schedule. When the clock hits 3pm, one of us rushes to pick up the kids after school and take them to skating lessons or religion classes but that’s only Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is not unusual for our kids to do their homework or arts and crafts in the office while mommy and daddy work past dinner time. Our conference room table is covered in paint, crayon and glue.
This venture is truly a labor of love and we hope that our transition from online to shelves in nationwide retailers will bring Bare closer to you.
Stay tuned for a list of stores carrying all the Bare Air-free products.