Beth Benike
speaker
87 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Beth Benike’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
All right, it's recording.
Oh, not good. Not good at all.
Yeah, well, I just talked to my best friend from the Army we met when we were serving together. And so I filled her in and she's feeling hopeless and helpless with me now.
So my name is Beth Beneke and I am the CEO and founder of Busy Baby. I grew up in Southern Minnesota, the daughter of an entrepreneur. My dad has a small business. He's a welder. So I grew up in his business and I grew up wanting to have my own business as well.
It was the freedom. It was the being able to leave work and come to my softball games and choose the work he wants to do and turn away the work he doesn't want to do. Being in control of your own destiny.
But what he always told me is, you know, you really got to be passionate about what you're doing because when hard times hit, and they absolutely will, if you're not passionate about what you're doing, you're not going to make it. So when I finished, graduated high school, I wasn't passionate about anything other than not going to college. I tried it and wasn't a big fan.
And a recruiter called me out of the blue and I ended up joining the military. So I joined the army. I convinced my brother to join the military. So we served together in Europe. We deployed to the war in Iraq and we started in Kuwait before the war started.
and so like to bring that around now now my brother runs busy baby with me oh wow um and we always joke about 20 what's it been like almost 22 23 years ago when we were sitting in the desert you know throwing little rocks at a bigger rock waiting for something to happen um did we ever imagine we'd be schlepping baby products out the back of our cars at the state fair like just if you would have told us that in iraq we would have just laughed
Yeah, so after the Army, it took me a few years to readjust to civilian life. So I settled back in in Minnesota. I found a great corporate job, and I met my now husband, and we started a family. So I had taken the full three months of maternity leave that my company offered and went back to work. And when I went back to work, two of my stay-at-home mom friends took me out for lunch.
Their girls were adorable, but a complete distraction the entire meal. Just doing what babies do. You know, they reach for everything on the table. They drop things on the ground. We couldn't finish a conversation, you know?
Exactly. So I just went online. What am I going to buy on Amazon that's going to make it so my kid's not this distraction when he's old enough to join us at the table? So I did the search on Amazon. My friend said, you know, you really need to make sure you have a clean surface to put baby's food on because you never know what they're wiping these tables down with.
If you put the stuff on the plate, the plates get thrown on the ground. I said, well, okay, cool. Yes, we need that. But I also want to attach their toys so that they can't throw them on the ground.
No, no. There's been a million pacifier clips where you can like attach stuff to their clothes. And then there's regular placemats that you can like, they had this, I think at the time it was pretty much just disposable placemats that you could like stick down to the table. And I wanted something that was going to be reusable and an idea popped in my head.
And that night I went home and I got like silicone caulk that you use to like caulk around your sink or your bathtub, whatever. And I squirted it into a quarter baking sheet and then I started cobbling together something that might work That developed into me buying some silicone dog mats off of Amazon and suction cups.
And then I used another set of like my husband's fishing tethers to glue attachment points to the top of the placemat. So now there was a mat where you could put the food and then also these little fishing tether things where I could just change out toys and just hook up the toys. And because it was suctioned to the table, baby didn't throw it onto the ground.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't even know it was called a prototype at the time or a minimum viable product, I now know is the term. The most important step was to find a professional who knew how to do that, because I certainly did not. So I found my product developers in Utah, and they held my hand all the way through the manufacturing process.
We did look for manufacturing in the U.S., and because we were at such a small scale, it wasn't a fit for us to be able to start in the U.S., so we started in China.
It comes down to... costs and volume. So it is very expensive to manufacture in the U.S. Obviously, the cost of labor is very high, but most of the raw material that we use in manufacturing, like for us, we use silicone, which comes from silica, which is not readily available and sourced in the U.S.,
So for us, to import the raw material was more expensive than importing the product in its finished packaged form.
So that's one aspect of it. But so for the factories that do exist in the U.S., they typically have very high minimum order quantities. So you would have to start off with 10,000 or 20,000 units of... to make it worth their time to set up the line. I mean, there's a lot of work that goes into a manufacturing line, setting up the machinery.
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