Frustrated by the time and work involved when taking care of their newborns, two fathers decided to develop their own time-saving device for babies.
Perth based Ricky Hee and Alex Djojoutomo realised they were spending hours cleaning and sterilising baby bottles instead of enjoying quality time with their baby daughters.
So they decided to do something about it and created the Bottle Bath, an all-in-one unit that sterilises and completely dries baby bottles.
“Bottle Bath was born out of our own frustration and laziness,” Hee jokes.
“We had waited so long to meet our daughters and just wanted to bond with them―instead we were stuck in the kitchen with dirty bottles. When we started asking other parents, we discovered that they also thought sterilising bottles was time-consuming, boring and a chore that takes you away from your baby.”
Over the past three years, Hee and Djojoutomo have invested their life savings and worked with experts in Singapore to design an effective, efficient and environmentally friendly baby bottle washer for families with babies who drink formula or expressed breastmilk.
“With Bottle Bath, you no longer have to boil water on the stove to sterilise bottles or waste time drying wet bottles that have come out of a standard steriliser,” Djojoutomo says.
“And you don’t need to stumble around in the middle of the night looking for bottles, trying to remember if they’ve been sterilised and worrying whether it’s been done properly.”
So what are the advantages of Bottle Bath?
• Time saving: once loaded bottles are cleaned, sterilised and dried in less than one hour. The time saving mainly comes from not needing to do three steps separately and wait for one to finish before doing the other. The manual process and Bottle Bath both need around an hour to finish all three steps but with Bottle Bath, you just spend a few minutes to load bottles and activate the device. Then you just walk away and come back when it’s done.
• Design: an innovative jet washing system thoroughly cleans every bottle automatically and the device then creates steam and uses it to sterilise each bottle, thus eliminating harmful bacteria and germs. Instead of a lid that needs to be lifted and removed, Bottle Bath has a swivel door that provides easy access to bottles and saves bench space.
• Environmentally friendly: Bottle Bath uses less water than manual or handwashing of bottles.
• Capacity: the device has been carefully designed to accommodate most brands of baby bottles. It has room for four bottles, as well as teats and lids.
• Space: Bottle Bath is designed to sit on the kitchen benchtop, reducing clutter and the need for separate devices and equipment.
“Today’s mums and dads are busier than they’ve ever been, but they’re also more willing to embrace technology that makes life easier for their families. That’s exactly what Bottle Bath is designed to do,” Djojoutomo adds.
The duo is currently fine-tuning Bottle Bath and they are about to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise additional funding to bring their product to market.
