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Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Inventor Mom: Debbie Stephens Stauffer, with sons Boone, 2 (left), and Weston, 3, invented DaysAgo with a friend and business partner initially to help her keep track of how long jars of baby food had been opened in her refrigerator.

Simple solutions to household problems

By Cody Kraatz

For some people, inspiration comes out of thin air.

For others, it comes out of the fridge. That's where longtime Cupertino resident Debbie Stephens Stauffer and her friend, Kathleen Whitehurst, found a common problem with a pretty simple solution.

"We were inspired, actually, by baby food," said Stauffer, who is pregnant with her third child.

The two moms pooled their financial and intellectual resources and invented the DaysAgo, a small device that affixes by magnet or suction cup to household items to help people remember how long food has been open or how many days ago they did a certain chore.

Since they founded double u products, inc. in 2006 and launched their gadget later that year, they have been honored with a handful of awards and extensive press coverage throughout the United States.

On Jan. 24, Stauffer flew to Chicago to appear on the Oprah Winfrey TV show in a segment on inventor moms. The show will be broadcast in early February, Stauffer said.

The two inventors were also awarded Good Housekeeping magazine's Good Buy Award as the best new product of 2007.

As Stauffer describes the moment of inspiration, "we were sitting here, right here in this kitchen, and we were trying to come up with ideas for an invention. We had this big plan and it seemed overly elaborate, especially for new entrepreneurs like us."

The women had a preventive nutrition game in mind that would help children build healthy eating habits.

Whitehurst, who has two children in their 20s, went to the fridge to get some baby food for Stauffer's son, Boone, who was about a year at the time. There were several jars of baby food open, and baby food has a short shelf life after it's opened, Stauffer said.

"Kathleen said, 'How do you keep track of that?' " said Stauffer, who could only answer that, unfortunately, she didn't have any special method except her own memory.

"That was the need, and this was the solution," she said, sliding across the countertop a simply designed package containing two brightly colored DaysAgos.

The entrepreneurs' future business plans do not involve any completely new products but, instead, expansions on the possible uses of their original product. Hinting at plans still under wraps, Stauffer said they hope to offer the same tracking tool, but in different forms to track different things.

Stauffer said her business would never have gotten off the ground or become so successful without networking with various product designers and manufacturers. The two inventors were big on ideas and questions, but short on technical know-how.

"How do you make it really simple, with just one button? We wanted it to be a transparent tool in the kitchen," Stauffer said.

They worked with different product designers from around the country to come up with the one-button design and the look of the gadget. They sent a product design consultant to a conference in China to check out a possible manufacturing facility and make sure it had the kind of working environment that was safe and healthy for its workers.

They looked at the manufacturing cost to see if they could afford it, with help on the financial side from Stauffer's husband Scott, president of the Cupertino Chamber of Commerce and a limited partner in the local branch of Edward Jones Investments.

"He's been a really important player and coach with our business," said Stauffer of her husband, who is also very active in Rotary and helped provide contacts through his role in the Chamber.

"There's so many different vendors and advisers, it's really difficult to know who to go to. It's such a blind process," said Stauffer. "By networking we were able to go to people with positive referrals. It surprised me that it required so much networking, but in Cupertino there's a real entrepreneurial spirit--people really love to see that happen."

Whitehurst lives in St. Helena. She and Stauffer have been friends since their husbands were both on the board of a nonprofit Stauffer worked with in Fresno. Whitehurst's husband was also mayor of Fresno from 1977 to 1985. With 25 years of experience with a retail gift store, Whitehurst brings plenty of experience on the retail side to the business, Stauffer said.

The DaysAgo product was recently launched at Formex, a major design-focused trade show in Stockholm, Sweden. The company hopes a Swedish distributor will pick up the product for retail all over Scandinavia, a four-country market.

That distributor told Stauffer, "This is bigger than baby stores," she said.

The product is already on the shelves in 25 states, Canada and the United Kingdom, Stauffer said. It is available online at www.howmanydaysago.com.

Stauffer and Whitehurst are not an anomaly, but represent a growing movement among stay-at-home moms and homemakers who have come up with creative ways to make a living that work around their personal life, rather than the other way around.

One such entrepreneur mom Stauffer read about is Tamara Monosoff, a Walnut Creek woman who left her job as a Clinton White House staffer and business consultant when her daughter was born. She invented the TP Saver to prevent kids from unraveling the toilet paper too far. It sells for $6.95 and she did $1 million in sales in her first year.

Lisa Yap is another local inventor mom Stauffer knows of through Las Madres, a county-wide mothers network that organizes playgroups for children her sons' age. Yap designed a stylish diaper bag for moms and started her company O Yikes! in 2005.