BumpyName: Durable ID Bands Keep Babies and Bottles Together

A small problem had become a huge irritation. Brenda Lee and Keith Feldman, BBA ’91, had enrolled their children in a pre-school that required each child’s belongings to be labeled with his or her name. After much experimenting and frustration, Brenda found that neither permanent markers nor stick-on labels on her children’s sippy cups could survive daily wear and tear.

“I knew there had to be a better way to label a container that could regularly get run through the wash and withstand a toddler’s habits and curiosities,” she says.

And so a brilliantly simple idea was born. BumpyName is a curvy, synthetic band personalized with a child’s name on one side and Braille on the other.

The band fits snugly around cups, bottles and other containers, helping families, day care centers, teachers and babysitters keep objects in the little hands of their rightful owners. It’s boilable, microwaveable, reusable, dishwasher safe, non-toxic, comes in two colors (BuggyBlue and GummyGreen) and can be personalized from a catalog of 225 names.

After conceiving the idea for BumpyName, the Feldmans built their company, InchBug LLC, from the ground up. Brenda designed a company logo, a product designer tweaked the prototype, a graphic artist created original packaging and a Webmaster built a Web site with a secure online store (www.bumpyname.com).

The Feldmans applied for patents and received bids from manufacturing companies, eventually selecting a factory in China to produce the product. Keith finalized the business plan, secured financing and launched the online store in March 2006.

The hardest part was coming up with a name.

“It took months, but ‘BumpyName—The Original Orbit Label’ was chosen,” she says. “We coined the term Orbit Label to describe the function of the product.”

The whole process took a little more than a year. BumpyName is expected to be widely available in retail stores this summer.

In 2005, BumpyName received an iParenting Media Award—a prestigious award given to child care products after they undergo extensive testing and evaluation—for its innovative design. “Thousands of products are reviewed each year, so to be a recipient of this award was affirmation for us that we had produced a high-quality and marketable product,” Brenda says.

The future of InchBug will not stop with BumpyName. “We anticipate that we will provide other products with a concentration in the infant, toddler and youth markets,” Keith says. The two are also working on a variation of BumpyName, but are keeping quiet about the details.

“Based on the feedback we’ve received, we think the new BumpyName will result in tremendous sales growth,” Brenda said. “It’s exciting, and we hope to have an announcement soon.”

Keith and Brenda met as undergraduates at The University of Texas at Austin in 1990, but parted ways. More than a decade later, they reunited in Austin where Brenda worked in business development for Fortune 500 company Automatic Data Processing, Inc. Keith—a Secret Service agent on presidential detail at the time—was assigned to protect President Bush’s daughter Jenna while she attended college in Austin. The couple married in 2001.

Keith studied management at McCombs, and after working as a residential real estate appraiser, he began a career in law enforcement. Today, he is a special agent for the United States Treasury Department.

Keith and Brenda—who studied biology at the university and pursued a career in marketing and sales after graduation—manage InchBug LLC out of a warehouse facility. They have two young children—3-year-old Jacqueline (who models for all BumpyName packaging and promotional materials) and 2-year-old Grant.

Keith credits his time at the McCombs School with preparing him to put together the business plan and the subsequent financing and accounting for InchBug.

“Brenda came up with an ingenious invention and I am thrilled that McCombs provided me with the necessary business tools to make it happen,” he said. “We love to hear people say, ‘Why did it take so long for someone to think of that?’”
—Laura Griffin