(15 Apr 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Zumbrota, Minnesota – 15 April 2025
1. Various Beth Benike stocking products in her warehouse
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Beth Benike, Busy Baby founder and CEO: ++COVERED++
“For me and many, many, many other small businesses, this is not temporary pain. This is sudden death.”
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Beth Benike, Busy Baby founder and CEO: ++PARTIALLY COVERED++
“So I’m a mom that solved the problem all new parents have of babies dropping and throwing everything. So I created a line of products that allow you to keep things within reach and off the ground. And it started with the Busy Baby mat. It’s just a suction cup placemat that has tethers to attach toys.”
4. Benike demonstrating her product
5. Product on sample display
6. Business awards won by Benike
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Beth Benike, Busy Baby founder and CEO: ++PARTIALLY COVERED++
“I mean, the last six months has been huge for us. We launched in Walmarts in November. We launched in Targets last month. And two weeks ago, the Small Business Administration gave me an amazing award calling me the Small Businessperson of the Year from Minnesota. So we feel like after a tough year previously, we were on the up and up and hitting some new milestones and finally seeing some great growth in our business until last week.”
8. Various people packing product in warehouse
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Beth Benike, Busy Baby founder and CEO: ++PARTIALLY COVERED++
“We continually do production in China. And we have products that are ready to ship here now. They were supposed to ship last week. However, once the tariffs were announced and we realized that instead of paying $30,000, we were going to have to pay $230,000. We don’t have that kind of money.”
10. Various Benike working in warehouse
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Beth Benike, Busy Baby founder and CEO: ++PARTIALLY COVERED++
“We save for things. We plan for things. I planned for 20% to 30% tariff. I did not plan for 145% tariff. In two months when we run out of this stuff, there’s nothing else to sell, which means there’s no revenue coming into the business, which means I can’t pay my employees. I can’t pay the lease for this building. I can’t pay my loans. And I have a significant amount of debt because it was a big investment and a big risk to go into Walmart and Target. It’s a big step for our business. And it was a risk I was willing to take because it was the next big milestone for our company. But to get that loan, I had to leverage my house. So now if I default on that loan, I could lose my home.”
12. Various Benike working in office
13. SOUNDBITE (English) Beth Benike, Busy Baby founder and CEO: ++COVERED++
“I have plans to move forward. And there’s been a lot of interest in my products in other countries. There’s babies everywhere. So right now, the only option for me is to look into global distribution. But I need to figure this out very quickly. And because I need more than two to three months to learn how to do this and figure it out, we’ve started to GoFundMe to try and help raise money for our– to pay our tariff just to get the product into the country so that we can at least stay alive long enough to figure this out.”
14. Screen recording of GoFundMe page ++MUTE++
15. SOUNDBITE (English) Beth Benike, Busy Baby founder and CEO:
STORYLINE:
Beth Benike is no stranger to pressure. The mother and veteran pitched her line of silicone baby mats on the popular television show Shark Tank and recently started selling Busy Baby products in Wal-Mart and Target.
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