The Hour

Have you ever encountered a problem with your newborn baby and thought of a great invention that could solve it? Well, Scotland is a great place to take your bright spark idea and turn it into a viable business. And you wouldn’t be the first!

Louise Guinda realised there was a definite need for her product when she found her son Ali struggling to breathe.

“I had a really bad experience actually with my own son,” she explained to The Hour.

“He used, as most babies do, to love sleeping with his face pressed into his bumper and one day I found him really struggling to breathe and blue in the face, so that’s what inspired this design.”

Her product, the Safe Dreams cot wrap, surrounds the cot and makes sure that your baby’s arms and legs stay put while also ensuring that they can breathe comfortably. It is available online now at www.safedreams.co.uk.

Jenny McLaughlan came up with her business idea when her baby boy Miller kept chewing on her necklaces: “I thought if I could come up with something that would look stylish but was safe for baby to chew on then that would kill two birds with one stone.”

The result was a silicone-based, non-toxic necklace that’s safe for baby to chew. Jenny researched her idea on the internet and found a silicone that met the same standards as teething toys then moulded them into her designs.

These are available online at www.gumigem.co.uk.

Daniel Sutherland’s inspiration came during those long minutes waiting for milk to cool down in a bottle. His daughter was used to being fed as soon as she wanted it and quickly grew impatient.

He told The Hour: “Being a designer, I set to work to redesign the shape of the bottle with an increase in surface area and a complete revolution in terms of the shape. Our bottle will now cool down in less than 6 minutes... Purely down to the shape of the bottle.”

Daniel also had advice for any would-be baby business start-ups out there: “There are money pots out there available to the public, especially in Scotland.

“Scotland’s a fantastic place for entrepreneurs, for innovators, to go out and find money. Scottish Enterprise put you in touch with funding and put you in touch with great companies.”

You can buy his revolutionary bottle at www.milkistar.com.

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