MomBiz: Manhattan's Katie Danziger: The Accidental Entrepreneur

Quick stats: Katie lives in Manhattan, has been married for 17 years to Steve, and has three children - Jake, 16; Jilly, 14; and Josie, 3. 

   Just two years ago, Katie Danziger - then a full-time, stay-at-home mom - never imagined she would develop a new problem-solving product for parents that would take the guesswork out of cleanup. Katie hoped to sell her invention to a few friends and close up shop. Yet what started out as a small mishap, turned into an award-winning product and brand called Nomie Baby^TM - a cozy, waterproof, removable, and washable car seat cover.

What does 'Nomie' mean?

When my older daughter was small, she couldn't pronounce the word 'cozy' so she said 'nomie' and that name stuck in our family.

How did you come up with the idea?

My youngest child had spilled formula on her car seat and I tried to take the cover off to clean it. It was sort of a wrestling process and when I finally looked at the care instructions, it said, "do not machine wash." I went online to see if there was a bib or something that I could put over it but I couldn't find anything. There were covers, but there were none that were waterproof and I thought that if my daughter spilled something, it would just leak through to the existing cover anyway. I knew I couldn't be the only person having this problem so I decided to make something and sell it to some friends and that would be it. The more I looked into it, and after I told some friends, they said, "I can't believe there isn't anything like that - that would be perfect."

When did the idea turn into a business?

I couldn't find a material that would do everything I wanted it to do. I didn't want it to be plastic, but I wanted it to have the waterproof backing and I wanted it to be cozy. I finally met some people who do fabric sourcing and together we developed three fabrics that achieved what I wanted. Yet because we had to manufacture the fabric in China, we couldn't make just 100 hundred yards, we had to make thousands of yards. So all of a sudden, I realized that if I was really going forward with this, it was going to be a business.