Chew on this, kid
[attach]5743[/attach]Lindsey Sardi-Dubuc created a line of jewellery kids can sink their teeth into. But moms aren’t the only ones sporting these fashionable teething accessories.
“The bangles are huge for dads,” she says. “Especially when we’ve gone to trade shows. We’ve been to The Distillery District and the guys go, ‘I want something, too’ and they love that they’re able to do it.”
Sardi-Dubuc and her husband Michel Dubuc came up with Teethease, a non-toxic line of chewable jewellery, when their daughter Olivia was around six months old and common plastic-making compound bisphenol A (BPA) was declared a toxin.
“It was to fill a need, really,” she says. “All of a sudden, all of these plastic teethers we got as gifts when she was born we were going, ‘I don’t know if we should be using it.’ ”
Although safety was the main priority, she says the teething accessories are designed to look like jewellery because she wanted to create something easily accessible that could be worn before, during and after kids use them.
“Especially at the grocery store more than anything else it’s consistently the little kids with the keys and the necklaces and you’ll give them anything just to get through your shopping trip,” she says.
Sardi-Dubuc decided to start her own business from her home office near Lawrence Avenue East and Don Valley Parkway so she’d be able to stay at home with her kids. While she was pregnant, and after a year of planning and manufacturing, she started approaching the maternity stores she frequented about picking up her line.
“We didn’t have savings so we put anything and everything into it,” she says. “It was terrifying … I like to hide behind my computer so having to go into a store and saying ‘this is who I am and this is what we’ve done,’ it was terrifying. Or the unknown of how is the general population going to receive it? It was scary.”
Getting her designs ready for sale often required her whole family working together, including her parents, sister, husband and daughter.
“I wish we’d taken pictures but I’ve had assembly lines going here,” she says.
Although they’ve had several glitches along the way, like realizing after they already hand-packaged over 500 pieces that they applied the wrong sticker to the box or used the wrong packaging, she says every time she receives a nice email from someone about how they’ve gotten through a shopping trip because of Teethease or sees someone using it in a store, it makes it worthwhile.
“Those are the days where you can go home and you’re like okay I’m good to go, I can stay up until 2 a.m. and work today because that just made it worth it,” she says. “First of all who stops in their day to say thank you anymore? But it just sort of shows that all of the sort of hardships and the late nights up, somebody appreciates it and that’s a really nice feeling.”
