Oronoco's Busy Baby now has products on Walmart shelves
ORONOCO, Minn. — Oronoco's Busy Baby will soon be busy hitting the shelves of two Big Box retailers.
Busy Baby, founded in 2017 in Beth Benike's basement in Oronoco, started selling its silicone placemats with stretchy tethers to attach baby toys in Walmart on Nov. 4, 2024.
"Sometimes MASSIVE companies do things to support small brands like Busy Baby LLC," Benike recently wrote on LinkedIn. "We are so grateful for the support we've been getting as we get ready to launch in Walmart stores next week! Big thanks to Nilka Garcia for being our guiding light! Eric Fynbo and I are so #grateful!"
The products are now available in 250 Walmarts around the country , including three stores in the Twin Cities area. The Busy Baby items can also be found online at Target and will hit shelves there in March.
"We have a lot of pride," Benike said. " It's grown from my basement into a warehouse in Zumbrota, and now from just our little website into Walmart. ... It's been a pretty amazing journey and for those close to us or the people who've been following the journey, it's a really cool milestone."
Benike and her team also had to come up with new packaging and products for Walmart and Target. The products found on the shelves of Walmart will be a little different than the ones found on Busy Baby's website. Benike said her team developed feeding kits for families, which include a mini mat with a fork, spoon and bib. The fork and spoon are tethered to the bib.
"It's scary sometimes to always wonder if it is going to go well or will people buy it at Walmart?" Benike said, adding that in about four weeks the company will have a line review with Walmart to see what might happen next year.
The retailer could decide to expand the product into 4,000 stores, which means a huge investment for Busy Baby to buy inventory, or "if, for some reason, it doesn't sell, they can just send it back to us, and we would be out all that money."
Walmart also has an ad featuring Benike and her brother and business partner, Eric Fynbo, centered on the veteran-owned business. He also served in the Army.
Tired of constantly having to pick up toys thrown by her baby during meals, Benike decided to take matters into her own hands and started experimenting by cutting and pasting prototypes together in her basement and then testing them with her son. But everything quickly evolved.
"I made one for myself and one for my best friend who had a baby 8 days after me," wrote Beth in a post. "About a month later, my friend sent me a message that she had forgotten their 'mat thingy' the previous night and it was a miserable experience. She said she never knew how useful it was until she didn't have it and suggested that I 'make it for real.'"
Silicone baby placemats weren't a new item to the market, but Benike added a unique feature designed to make meal time a little easier for parents — stretchy tethers to attach baby toys to the placemat.
The tethers can be attached to any of four spots on the mat to keep pacifiers, teething toys or whatever is needed to keep a baby entertained from repeatedly falling to the floor. Customers have also discovered that the placemat can be wrapped around a shopping cart handle and secured by the suction cups to give a baby a safe spot to chew with tethered toys.
The business gained traction when a producer from the popular business start-up show, "Shark Tank," spotted a Kickstarter campaign that Benike ran to raise funds for Busy Baby. While Benike ultimately didn't take a deal on Shark Tank, it did introduce placemats and toy tethers to a wide audience.
From there, she began to sell her products on Amazon and in small stores across the state like Little Roos in Chaska and My Happy Place in Zumbrota. Since Shark Tank, Busy Baby has continued to grow with revenue skyrocketing up by 3,151% from 2019 to 2022.
