How Tushbaby Changed Baby Carriers, Topping $50 Million In Sales

Sure, babies can be the apples of your eyes. But carrying them around can be a pain in the neck. And the arms, the shoulders, the back and various other parts of your body. That’s what Tammy Rant felt before she designed a new type of hipseat baby carrier during the Summer of 2017. And, oh baby, has that solution taken off since then. It eventually led to her to join forces with Sara Azadi to found the company Tushbaby that has already generated over $50 million in sales over the past two years.

Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention

“[The Summer of 2017] was soon after I had my second daughter, who was ‘Velcro baby’ and hated the stroller,” recalled Rant, who at the time was working at LinkedIn. By “Velcro baby,” she didn’t mean a baby made out of Velcro, which would have been weird, but a baby who was quite clingy and frequently wanted to be carried. Rant had to shoulder a lot of this situation, literally, including suffering rotator cuff problems. She also experienced sciatica from strain on her back.

At the time, she couldn’t find an option that wasn’t too complicated, uncomfortable or inflexible. “I wanted something that made it easy up and easy down with the baby, took weight off the body, back and arms and was a comfortable carry. I also wanted to have storage so I didn’t have to carry diaper bag or bring around stroller too.”

That led to a rather hip idea. She designed an apparatus that would wrap around her hip and have a seat where the baby could sit. That allowed the weight of the baby to be supported by her hips rather the arms, shoulders and other parts of the body. Rant knew that she was on to something after she wore the prototype to a local park in the San Francisco, California, and was practically tackled by 12 parents asking her where they could buy what she was using. Naturally, at the time, the answer was that they couldn’t buy it anywhere. But that would soon change.

Diving (Or Perhaps Wading) Into The ‘Shark Tank’

Two months after she had designed the first prototype, in August 2017, Rant applied to appear on the ABC TV show Shark Tank. She spent the next six months working with designers, manufacturers and pediatricians to make this hipseat baby carrier more refined and even more hip so that it could become a marketable product

Rant didn’t hear back from Shark Tank until, guess what, she was pregnant with her third baby and suffering hyperemesis gravidarum for a third time, because that’s how life sometimes works, right? HG is basically a turbo version of morning sickness. So after a rep from Shark Tank called to request a 7 to 10 minute audition video, Rant had to film the video in between vomiting episodes with the help of her extended family member including her sister-in-law Riley Fane, who is now Tushbaby’s Creative Director. Once she submitted the video, Rant had to once again wait. And wait. And wait before finally being notified that she had made it to the next round.

The Birth of Tushbaby

At the time, Rant didn’t have any kind of company yet and thus was worried about being “eaten alive” in the Shark Tank. So, in May of 2018, she launched a Kickstarter campaign and filmed an accompanying video, again all while in the throes of all that throwing up stuff. Just a few days after the Kickstarter campaign was launched on May 8, Rant found out via a Facebook tag that the Daily Mail had covered the Tushbaby campaign. This soon led to more media coverage and eventually over 50 million views of the campaign with accompanying sales. The Kickstarter closed at $124,000. Shortly after, Rant flew to Los Angeles to make the following appearance on Shark Tank:

Rant ended up co-founding the Tushbaby company with Sarah Azadi, who prior to that was an executive vice president for Edelman, running the company’s digital marketing office. Azadi had experienced her own baby carrying injuries. Azadi mentioned having “mommy thumb,” also known as “baby wrist”, “cradle thumb” or the slightly harder to pronounce de Quervain’s tenosynovitis. Take a guess as to which of these is the official medical term for this condition. de Quervain’s tenosynovitis is the inflammation or swelling of the tendons on the thumb side of your wrist. Azadi had to deal with arms and shoulder pain as well and underwent surgery when her child was three and a half years old.

“My baby was attached to my hip, a stage 3 clinger,” recalled Azadi. “When I saw what Tammy had designed, I thought, ‘Why wasn’t this around?’” Neither Rant and Azadi had originally set out to be entrepreneurs. Both had stable jobs in established companies. Rant, who was originally from Egypt, and Azadi, originally from Iran, were not seeking a potentially riskier situation financially. But as Azadi emphasized, “We were going to solve an issue.” This proved to be a great match with “Tammy designing concept of the product,” Azadi explained. “She’s a real go getter, operationally minded. I handled the marketing. In the beginning, we did all the customer service.”

Carrying On With The Company

Tushbaby has now grown to a 15 person operation. While the original overall design has remained the same, Rant and Azadi mentioned “small improvements” such as “extra lumbar support” and “new types of fabric.” They emphasized how they have gone over the changes with pediatricians and incorporated customer feedback. Azadi also pointed out, “There are a lot of copy cats that have tried to copy the concept of a hipseat carrier.” She added, “But they haven’t put in the effort time and investment and have cut corners. A lot don’t do safety testing.”

Meanwhile, Tushbaby keeps carrying on with “every year 100% growth,” according to Azadi. “We’ve just scratched the surface.” Although the company has grown to 15 people, Rant and Azadi continue to play multiple roles, including both professional and familial. “Both of us have families to support,” they said. At the same time, they and their company are also supporting more and more babies by the babies’ tushes.