During the last several months, The Nanny Caddy, a teal-and-purple machine, have appeared at the Please Touch Museum, Smith Memorial Playground, Sesame Place, and Dorney Park. They dispense Huggies diapers in small, medium, and large; two kinds of pacifiers; baby wipes; hand sanitizer; a nursing wrap for discreet breast-feeding; sippy cups; diaper-rash ointment; and, compassionately, Tylenol, Advil, and tampons.
Three years ago, Celena Lentz, a former nurse from Gold Canyon, Ariz., took her 2-year-old son, Luke, shopping at a mall. “He had a poopy diaper, and I had run out,” she recalled. There was no drugstore in the mall, so she packed up the stroller to leave.
“He was screaming, and I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a machine for times like this?’ There have been so many times when I was at the mall or the zoo or the museum, and I ran out of diapers or wipes and couldn’t buy those things. I looked around at all the moms and thought, ‘I can’t be the only one this happens to.’ And the wheels started turning.”
Her husband, a building contractor, thought it was a brilliant idea. But Lentz had no business experience and didn’t have the slightest idea how she would come up with the money to start such a project. She mulled it over for a year and a half, had another baby, and then, one day last January, at Bible study with her aunt, cousin, and mother, it clicked.
“We were praying,” Lentz said. “My aunt said, ‘I feel we need to invent something,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I have the perfect thing.’ They said, ‘We’ll help you.’ I kind of got my prayers answered.”
Within a few months, a Nanny Caddy was dispensing emergency diapers in Superstition Springs Center, a nearby mall. Lentz sent out fliers to the magazines she found in the pediatrician’s office. One responded and wrote an article about her.
And that was how the Philadelphia connection came to be. Shannon FitzGerald, who lives in East Falls, had just had her second baby when she came across the article about Nanny Caddy.
She told her husband, Patrick Fitzgerald, about it. He has made it his career to get businesses off the ground. He tracked Lentz down and asked if she wanted help building the business.
Now Nanny Caddy’s chief executive officer, FitzGerald said the company is making in the five figures and negotiating with major venues such as Walt Disney World and the King of Prussia mall as part of a national expansion.
Please Touch instantly welcomed the Nanny Caddy, considering it a “no-brainer,” a museum spokesman said. The machine stands next to the restroom entrance. Last week, it registered only 27 sales, but countless appreciative visits from adults who said they were thrilled to know it would be there when they needed it.
Tags: nanny caddy
Do you Want to say something?