About the creators of Totes Babies & the journey to Shark Tank & beyond.

THE INVENTION OF TOTES BABIES

Lindsey was born in Rockford, IL and now lives in Naperville, IL. Her dad and business partner, was a CEO of a retail store fixture business and during her youth he taught Lindsey the ropes by having her work in many of the companies departments. Lindsey didn't imagine she'd go into inventing products for kids, she actually studied Theatre Arts at Northern Illinois University. You can see her artistic theatre skills on TikTok, check out all Totes Babies socials to see the founder and join our community!

The idea for the Totes Babies Car Seat Carrier was 100% created by a problem Lindsey felt after the birth of her first son. She felt so cooped up and just wanted to get out of the house and go grab some groceries. It was at that moment with her son that she discovered that the car seat takes up the entire shopping cart and doesn't even fit inside of some narrower ones. 

How was it possible that parents went shopping with their babies without removing them from their car seat?

She looked online for a solution and realised there wasn't really another out there besides shopping as a unit with your partner and wielding two shopping carts which would difficult to coordinate. Or going alone and managing only a few small items while the car seat would take up most of the cart. During one frustrating shopping trip Lindsey thought of the idea of a horizontal “sling” to suspend the car seat across and above my cart. She knew it had to be safe, simple and beyond sturdy enough to hold a lot of weight of a car seat and growing babies. She went right to her dad who holds over 40 patents and he drew up a great sketch that they showed their friend who is an engineer.

During this development process Lindsey's supportive husband Mark came up with the idea to apply to Shark Tank. After applying, Totes Babies got a call the next day! It's wild to go from being a new mother, creating a product that is useful for any new parent to a journey of pitching it on national TV to a bunch of famous investors. All it took was an idea and stepping out of their comfort zone!

From the first call to actually going to Vegas to film was a super long process with tons of paperwork. There were several weeks of filming video pitches as part of the application to make it to the final round of who would be on the show. On top of that this was in the summer of 2020 during the pandemic so everything was different. Instead of doing pitches in person with the production team, it was done over video chat. When they finally knew we were going to be pitching to the sharks on set they had about 24 hours to get ready to fly to Vegas and when Lindsey and her father got there they had to quarantine separately for 9 days. Lindsey and her father couldn't even see each other to practice the pitch before the show, so they had to rely on Zoom.

"Going on the show was a whirlwind and an absolutely amazing experience.  Again, the prep for just getting to pitch to the sharks is A LOT of work but so worth it! The whole Shark tank crew was so great to work with and super organized! I think I was just in shock that we were there and forgot most of what I actually said in the tank! All of the sharks gave us great advice that we too and ran with after airing and they were so kind to us." - Lindsey Fleischhauer

Phone & tablet holders that can connect to the shopping cart which pairs perfectly with the Totes Babies car seat carrier.

In the future, Totes Babies plans to create more innovations and become a household brand name with many products to make life better.