The brainchild of School of Management junior Stephen Glichowski’s 11-year-old brother, ‘Bed Buddy Animals,’ offers toddlers a fun alternative to crib safety mechanisms and parents a good night’s sleep.
The product is a bed safety rail embedded in and disguised as a teddy bear or stuffed animal, which can cushion the rail’s impact, as well as offer children a fun companion.
Its creator, the MMFB team, an acronym that stands for ‘Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch,’ includes SMG juniors Glichowski, BJ Kito, Mark Marcus, Karen Matley, Daria Mazurkiewicz and Beth Theirl.
Team members said their product’s advantage is its simple, practical and marketable value. Designed for a crib or small bed, the product is targeted for use by one- to three-year-old children. Since it is considered a luxury item and a premium improvement on the traditional bed rail, team members plan to sell it to parents in an upper income bracket.
MMFB team members attribute their success and camaraderie to luck – they were grateful to be placed on a team with people they get along well with – and respect, a dynamic crucial to a project they compare to an eight-hour workday. The team also credits its efficiency, since each member specializes in a certain area, keeping meetings focused and productive.
Their business plan, which includes a 45-page written report and 60 pages of exhibits, spreadsheets and other visual data, came from countless hours of work, however, team-members said. Nevertheless, at Theirl’s suggestion at beginning the project, the team said it agreed never to pull an all-nighter. It has held to that pact, rarely even holding meetings lasting longer than five hours more than three times per week, members said.
MMFB has had to overcome many challenges in the development of their product, according to its members. While researching industry data, the team quickly discovered that many businesses refuse to provide prices and data to students creating a fictitious product. On numerous occasions, Kito and Glichowski said they used aliases in order to get the information they needed.
According to its members, the experience of inventing and developing a unique product was more than just an assignment for MMFB. For Mazurkiewicz, she said being part of a core team allowed her to learn more than what any textbook can offer.
‘You learn to have a lot of tolerance for each other, a lot of patience [and to] be able to take criticism and feedback from other people,’ she said. ‘You get exposed to it in other SMG classes, but with this, you are constantly in the work environment.’
Theirl agreed that Core has provided more knowledge than the average college class and has proved a positive learning experience.
‘Not only do you learn a lot of about the product you are building, but you learn overall how a business is started and run,’ she said. ‘I think of it as a real job – a real life experience without all the pressures of getting paid for it.’
The team said it has learned the importance of group dynamics to a team success. According to members of the MMFB team, a successful core group needs to cooperate as a team, respect each other, remain realistic and set its own rules and deadlines.
It wouldn’t hurt to ask your kid brother for ideas, either.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
