Necessity may be the mother of invention, but Eric Marseglia devised an invention that is a necessity for mothers.
The Hermosa Beach resident is the creative force behind the Nipple Caddy, a sanitary storage system for the nipples and collars of baby bottles. He encountered dozens of complications along the way, each leading to another unexpected route of bringing the product to market. But rather than discourage him, the mounting difficulties fortified his faith in his idea, showing him what he was capable of overcoming.
“Until it happens, you don’t realize how strong you are, and how driven you are to make it succeed,” Marseglia said. “There are many things in my life that I’ve started that I haven’t finished because I lost that drive. I never lost the drive for this, because I believed in it so much.”
At the time he came up with the idea, Marseglia and his wife Micki were constantly on the go with their infant daughter Franki. Filling a diaper bag with an array of clean bottles would leave little room for anything else. They used the a drop-in liner feeding system for bottles, but found that storing and keeping clean the nipples and collars that the system required was confusing. Keeping them in a plastic bags made it difficult to distinguish between clean and dirty equipment. (Babies can suffer from oral thrush, a fungus in the mouth and throat, as a result of feeding from unclean bottles.)
Marseglia looked for something online, but found nothing. He spoke with his circle of fellow South Bay parents, and heard a chorus of need.
Marseglia has a tinkerer’s mind, and was always coming up with ideas. But prior plans had petered out, unable to surmount the very real obstacles associated with manufacturing.
“I have thought of a thousand ideas before. I would draw them out, or I would say, ‘Boy they need to make a refrigerator that goes in your car,’” Marseglia said. “But it’s expensive to do. ‘Oh it’s $5,000 for a patent? Oh, it’s this for lawyers? Oh, it’s that for tooling?’ All of a sudden, you start seeing numbers you’ve never seen in your life and you say, ‘Ah, forget it.’”
Marseglia went through a number of ideas before settling on a final design. The device works by stacking five to six sterilized nipples and collars in a bottle-shaped caddy, and is compatible with the Playtex and BabiesRUs nursing systems. Dirty set-ups are separated from clean by a water-resistant membrane at the bottom, and a release valve pushes air and moisture out the top. And this time, the idea stuck.
“There’s that tipping point in your life. Either you take advantage of it, or you don’t,” Marseglia. “I thought, ‘Wow, this could literally change my life.’ And no matter what, I tried something, I followed through, I did the best I could, and in the end, I can at least say I tried.”
It would not be easy. Marseglia had hired a China-based injection molding company early in the process and provided some money up front. But the company asked for the rest of the money before he had received a sample, and Marseglia refused to fork over everything.
A few weeks later, the molding company declared bankruptcy. Someone inside the company had been stealing millions of dollars.
Marseglia’s quick thinking saved him some money, but the celebration was short-lived: He still had to get his product out of the hands of a Chinese bankruptcy trustee. Eventually, a friend helped him recover the goods, and get them back to the United States for less than what he would have paid otherwise. And once the goods actually got the United States, the type of plastic was too rigid; it would take several more months to find the right polymer blend.
There are also self-imposed constraints. Once he got the manufacturing tools made in China Marseglia, a veteran of the Marine Corps, wanted the product to be domestically produced. He found a manufacturer in Garden Grove and a packaging plant in Burbank.
After years of effort, the Nipple Caddy is on the market. It’s available for order through Amazon, and has found buyers as far away as the Philipines. But some of the first customers were in the South Bay.
Manhattan Beach-resident Melissa Iacono has three boys ages 2, 8 and 10. The Nipple Caddy wasn’t around for her two older children, but she said it has been a life-saver with her youngest.
“If you use the Playtex nursing system, you can’t live without it,” Iacono said. “It’s hard enough to have all the other gear that comes with the kids. It’s just one less thing to have to think about.”
