Whisper Wear breastpumps
Creativity and innovation, they say, is what drives this world towards more and more success. The staid, mother-and-baby-care industry had been witnessing the usual breast pumps for decades on end. The working woman of today had long settled down to a routine of having to perform their milk exercising duties in public view - colleagues invariably came to know that she was lactating. Most of the time, privacy is just not available. It is this situation that the people behind Whisper Wear targetted. And the Hands-free breastpump was born.
Whisper Wear, a Georgia based company, has at its helm minds that are experts in engineering as well
as lactation. Ken Myers, the engineer, was CEO of Riverside Design Group, Inc, before he entered
healthcare, an industry totally new for him. Ellen Lundy had been a registered nurse for more than twenty
years. The idea of coming out with a totally new pump had been germinating in Lundy's mind for quite
some time, as she struggled with finding the perfect breastpump for mothers with some or the other
nursing problem. Ken Myers was looking for a new breakthrough in career, and Lundy's idea showed
him the perfect opportunity. The first prototype of the pump was designed keeping in mind certain
basic parameters, each of which focussed on the question, "How is it going to be beneficial for both
the mother and the child?"
After germinating the business idea, cropped up the question of floating a company and funding its operations. The company was founded in 2001, and the founders began searching for venture capitalists. A venture-finance consulting group, Atlanta Technology Advisors, took up their case. Karen Robinson and Richard Cope, heading the group, gave the idea enough jazz to make it attractive to angel investors around the country. Their efforts bore fruit in the form of private equity worth more than USD 1.4 million in a round of Series B financing, which got finalized around 2003. The rest, as they say, is history.
It has always been the bane of working mothers, of not being able to find a private place where she can carry out the expressing in a relaxed fashion. She also seems torn between the mutually conflicting tasks of milk expressing and office tasks such as answering the phone, keying in on the computer, handling the fax machine, and so on. Whisper Wear Breast pumps, when they were launched in the market in 2001, were immediately lapped up by such moms due to the tremendous freedom the device affords them. These pumps are totally hands-free, meaning while the pumping is in progress, your hands can carry on with whatever tasks are there in front of you.
In case there is an electric outlet nearby, there is a long-enough wire that can be plugged from the socket to the device, which actually operates on about three volts. In case you are travelling, all that you need to do is put in two AA alkaline or NiMH batteries, hidden within the cups, and off you go!
The Whisper Wear breast pump is useful in situations other than for working moms, too. There are cases when the child has a biological condition which rules out nursing. These pumps can prove to extremely useful here; especially if the parents are determined not to put the child on to formula feed. Also, if the child is going to stay away from the mother for an extended period of time, it is always advisable to express milk and store it in a freezer, so that the person taking care of the child can feed the latter with it.
That the Whisper Wear breastpump has proved to be extremely popular, can be gauged from the fact that, within six months of its launch, more than three hundred retail outlets are stocking the product, and the number has been growing exponentially ever since!