In the summer of 2007, Linda Lewis was boating at Mark Twain Lake when she discovered the family had left behind her grandson’s baby bottle. Improvising, she fashioned a makeshift feeding container from a water bottle—but it was difficult to funnel in the formula, and the feeding process was a mess.
The result: a soggy baby and wasted formula.
Seeing a need, Lewis set out to develop a reusable bottle nipple, complete with a funnel that could attach to any water bottle. It took her four years, 15 prototype designs, and thousands of dollars (Lewis had to sell her boat, car, and dip into her 401K in the process, she says), but the first-time inventor somehow defied the odds.
“I wanted to [make] it fit every size of water bottle out there, but the people in manufacturing said, ‘Linda, you could never do it,’” she says, “which I have.” In May, Flipple began appearing on shelves at Schnucks, HyVee, Country Market, and buybuy BABY.
A resident of Galesburg, Ill., Lewis says she owes much of her success to InnovateVMS, a venture-mentoring service that’s part of Innovate St. Louis. She also plans to keep production here. “People have told me, ‘You have to go to China; you can’t get competitive pricing here,’" she says. “But it’s American-made, so it will be a trusted product.”
Her next possible project? A sippy-top version of Flipple.
