4 Humanity Baby Products: Where safety meets purpose
- KLS
- 1 day ago
- 13 min read
For the 201st feature of our "Together Talks" campaign, we collaborated with 4 Humanity Baby Products and CEO/Founder, David Williams. At 4HumanityBaby, they create premium, multifunctional strollers designed to simplify parenting and protect childhood. With over 35 years of experience in child-safe product design, their founder David Williams launched the Hero and Sidekick strollers to offer modern parents a smarter, safer, and more affordable choice without compromising on style or function. But they’re more than a stroller brand. 10% of every sale supports organizations fighting child trafficking and supporting survivors, including Compass 31, The Teen Project, and Casa Teresa.
"Together Talks" feature # 201: 4 Humanity Baby Products presented by KLS - Your Trusted Shipping Solutions In The USA
Story of how it was created?
I've been in baby products since 1989. Quick background, I was a sales rep, independent sales rep, got hired as a VP of sales for a baby bottle manufacturer, and then got recruited to Graco, became the director of global sales for Graco. We got bought out by Newell Rubbermaid, and they wanted to eradicate our culture, so we all got terminated.
We scattered throughout the industry, so to speak. I ended up as the president of Baby Trend, and then had two ventures into car seat companies where I was a key role in product development and licensing , then kind of took an exit. I sold my interest in Kids Embrace, took a little hiatus, was doing some real estate investing, fix & flips and that kind of stuff. My mentor, who brought me into the baby products industry in 1989, who was also my boss at Graco, called me out of the blue and we were catching up. He was telling me that he and his son-in-law had started a direct-to-consumer stroller company and invested very little money because of some relationships they have with manufacturers in China and exited in three and a half years for nearly $10,000,000.
He sent me the website. I was looking at it and thought more could have been done. Then COVID hit, I had and still have a fractional ownership of an Airbnb in Newport Beach, California. I went out there to Balboa Island. It's an island of about 1,500 homes or so with a boardwalk around it, As walking around the island, I'm seeing this same stroller over and over. Now, I've been out of the industry for probably three or four years. The stroller going around named Uppababy, I've not heard of them. I finally stopped somebody and asked what they like about this stroller. I got the typical Newport Beach, "Oh, my God, my friend thought it was the best. So I had to have it!" I thought well, that's not telling me anything. I started asking the reverse question. What do you dislike? Now, I got a list, it was too wide to get through the aisles. It converts from a single to a double, but the lower seat, which is where they tell you to put your bigger child, is smaller than the upper seat. When you fold it, it doesn't stand by itself. It doesn't have a handle to pick it up with when it's folded. It uses adapters, the adapters make it wiggle- wobble and they break.
I started doing a deep dive and research on that. I actually went to Nordstrom's where they sold it and was interviewing the salespeople. It was the same things that the moms were telling me. I reached out to some of my contacts in China and said I want to design a new stroller to go up against Uppababy. The guy I reached out to was my quality control manager at my car seat companies, and he starts laughing at me. I asked what he is laughing about? He said, "my wife is the factory manager for that relationship with Uppababy. I can tell you everything you want to know." I said start talking. He told me that they'd had a couple of recalls. They were dealing some issues with the factory. That particular factory's name is Good Baby, and they purchased Evenflow, which was a pretty well-recognized name in the U.S. market. They purchased the Evenflow brand and then knocked off a cheaper version of the Uppababy stroller. Uppababy was upset with them, and they were trying to find another factory, they were having a lot issues, bottom line.
I said, okay, well, I want to do something different. They said, "the guy that designed that stroller has now left the factory, and he is going independent. You want to talk to him?" I said, sure. Long story short, and 25- 30 grand later, I have a blueprint for a new stroller. The next thought was to find a factory, and I found a factory that was doing about $40 to $45 million in wholesale in Europe but had no U.S. presence. I told them, I'm the guy for the U.S.
We developed the tooling, and a lot of it was bootstrap, a lot of it friends and family money, and then found a lead investor, and we were ready to go into production, and cancer struck his family, and he said, "I'm going to pull back and focus on family and health." And I understand that completely.
We've been seeking capital since, and probably the biggest challenge that I didn't expect was raising capital, because I had raised capital for these other car seat companies and did it in a matter of months, and it wasn't difficult. I'm a Christian. I kind of feel like God's is giving me the plan. God's in the reason. During that time, I'm flipping through channels on the TV and asking God, What's the problem? What's going on here? What are we trying to learn? What are You going to teach me? I always had this relationship with God and told Him, you want me to learn something? You better hit me over the head with a 2 x 4 because I'm as stubborn as can be. I turn the TV on, 37 girls were found that were being trafficked in Atlanta and their ages were 9 to 13.
I went, okay, there's the 2 x 4 because my eldest two granddaughters were 9 and 13. It just kind of hit me and I get emotional even now when I talk about it because it hit me so hard.
What if it were one of my grandchildren that was taken? How would we feel as a family? How would I feel personally? Not just the trauma that, but that child is going through that's being sold seven, eight times a day for exploitation. How does that person even live with themselves? What's going on inside their head? Can they ever recover from that?
I did a deep dive into it and honestly, I got into a black hole. I had to pull myself out of this. I was getting a little too deep, a little too dark. I got to a point where I couldn't function. I'm talking about a matter of three, four or five months. I went, okay, I got to pull back. I got to pull back and find my niche where I can contribute. I had happened to meet somebody, happenstance that was a former victim of trafficking, had become an intravenous drug user, was nearly beaten to within an inch of her life and saved by one of her former johns. She was taken to a recovery home and then turned her life around. She actually partnered with Russell Brand, the comedian actor, to start a rehab center. That relationship didn't work out, but she ended up starting an organization called The Teen Project, and she has fostered over 140 some odd girls. She's been on Steve Harvey several times. Her name is Lauri Burns.
I asked Lauri to tell me more about this. What can I do to contribute? What can I do to help? Lauri then introduced me to several other people, and I just started finding causes. Through my current relationship, found a guy by the name of Om Mahwah that, I'll give you the cliff notes. He was a former cybersecurity behavioral specialist for Walmart and went to a Tony Robbins event and wrote a business plan, and it was to shut down human trafficking through cyber warfare, by penetrating into the cyber doings, the digital doings of these organizations that trafficked women. He learned everything he could about them, and then went to them and said, look, if you don't turn the girls over, one push of the button, I delete everything that exists for you digitally. Banking is everything. He's had about a 93% success rate and he saved over 48,000 women. That's kind of what the brain trust of this thing, how it came about was, I wanted to make a better stroller. I thought there was a way to do it and then I kind of got the sidebar of, hey, I can do this for others. I can still make a nice profit, and I can still return a very good ROI for investors. But I can contribute a lot of money towards saving people and helping them recover. We're kind of kicking around how do we get that message out there the right way.
What separates you from your competition?
Not only is it a better product, but we're differentiated because we're a modular system that doesn't use adapters. We're the only one in the industry that does that. We're taking modularity away from just the stroller and car seat, car seat to car, to now car seat to inside the house, connecting to a swing, keeping the child in motion. Because a lot of parents say that their child goes to sleep in the car, they bring it home, they take the car seat out of the car, set it down, wham, they're waking. With ours you put it in a swing, the swing keeps them in motion. The swing transforms itself into a high chair later. We have a jogging platform, so you can take the seat off a regular stroller, click it onto a jogging stroller.
We're a multiple platform modular system, number one. Number two, we're less expensive, we're a better value because we're direct to consumer. Because of the social impact side, we appeal to about 86% more. Our target market audience, is 86% more likely to buy our product because of social impact. They're willing to pay more for it, but we're less expensive models. We have a lot of differentiators from not just the product quality itself, but being a social impact company, it gives us a much broader appeal.
What have been the biggest challenges?
Raising capital. Honestly, that's it. That's the only challenge I've really had. Now, there's been a lot of lessons along the way, better ways of branding, better way to connect to the clientele, with AI and everything else that's going on.
My girlfriend and I were at a play the other night, we were talking. We about technology changes in just my lifetime. Now I'm considerably older than you are, but we didn't have cell phones when I was a kid. We didn't even have remote phones. Just the amount of technology has taken place in my lifetime, but now the technology has taken place over the last three or four years with AI and what AI can do for you.
We're a product company in its infant stages with infant products, right? How do we get customer retention? I had a conversation with a gentleman just the other day on SaaS applications. We're collecting data. We're a direct-to-consumer, so we're collecting data. Now what do we do with that data we've collected from that person? Now, how do we put this into a timeline that says, okay, little Johnny was born on, April 15th of 2025. By April of 2026, he's going to need tennis shoes. But, what happens with mom and dad after they have a baby? They're looking to get back in shape. Why can't we have athletic wear for them? A Lululemon type of clothing line that maybe has improved. I'm looking at a whole family of products to sell to them from a consumer standpoint as the family grows, as the family evolves, what products can we bring to them? It will all be based on improved product. How do we make improvements? How do we bring a better value? And what social impact can we make?
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur?
I can't say that I've learned it, but I am now applying it. I was fortunate to play college baseball and played for a national championship, two national championship teams. I played for a coach by the name of John Scalinus, who is a legend. He's passed, but is a legend. He gave a speech, that tons of people read it and reference it, called 17 Inches. Look it up. It's a story about life, not about baseball, But he is the parody of baseball with that.
The lessons that he always taught us is surround yourself with good people. My lesson is, now that I'm a solopreneur, I need to find the right team. I need to surround myself with the right people. I don't have to know it all. I just have to know what I don't know and find the people that know what I don't know, if that makes sense. It's really just about your team.
Playing baseball. I knew what made the difference between our 1982 baseball team and our 1983 baseball team. 83 won a national championship. We went to Hawaii on spring break. We bonded as a team. We went surfing. We went hula hoop, dancing at Bobby McKeown's. But we melded as a team, and we ended up winning 21 straight games and going on to the World Series. It's about team building. It's about getting the right people, not just maybe from a knowledge standpoint, but also from a chemistry standpoint. You've got to have the right chemistry within your team, the right culture.
That's probably the thing I'm most excited about, to be honest with you. It's not so much about the product because I've built product and I'm excited about the product, but that's been done for a while. Now it's about, how do we create this culture and make it a culture that thrives? I listen to a lot of podcasts, listen to a lot of people, and trying to meld that knowledge into a cohesive unit is going to be the next challenge and also the most exciting.
What aspect of entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most?
This is going to probably come off a little bit odd, but it's the mindset of abundance. I'm not talking about abundance in finance. I'm talking about the abundance in opportunities and the abundance in creativity, the abundance in freedom. The abundance in all of it. There's a meditation that I'll listen to sometimes at night when I can't sleep. One of the things it says is to sit there, breathe deep, and now imagine the abundance around you. Imagine in a park how much grass there is, the abundance of grass, the abundance of trees. When you start to look at the world and you see that there is no limitation except what we create in our mind, you can take on a different mindset of abundance.
I can abundantly help people. I can abundantly create. I can have an abundance of wealth if I want. There are no limitations in our lives. We create those limitations. The thing that I think I've learned and I start to really appreciate in being an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, is there are no limitations. The only limitations we have are those we set for ourselves. I think that's probably the handcuffs that were removed from leaving corporate was, there are no limitations.
What is your why?
My why is to make a difference in the world. It's not just social impact. I've got four sons. I've got eight grandkids so far. I would like to set up something that's a legacy for them to take on and grow and continue to build through the generations long after I'm gone. Will that happen? I have no idea. I want to create that opportunity for it. Legacy is on the top of that too. I want to leave an impact, not only on my family, but on the world. People look back and say, okay, well done. You did what you did the best you could with what you had.
Do you have a moment that brings you the most joy?
I can tell you when it will be.
The minute I drive or walk down the street and I see somebody pushing one of my products and I can walk up to them and ask, "how do you like that? Are you enjoying your product? And then the stunned on their face when I say, that's my product. I developed that. This is my thing. Especially in baby products, when I tell people what I do for a living. I'm a decent-sized guy. I'm a former athlete, a former professional athlete, and they look at me and go, baby products? It's a little shocking to people sometimes, but I think that's going to be the biggest, the biggest reward for me and the biggest joy that I will find in this venture is when I can see my product on the street.
Piece of Advice
There's so many lessons, Sean, along the way that you learn, right? As a solopreneur, it's expected to cost twice as much and take two to three times as long as you ever envisioned it would be. Probably the best advice I could give, is plan for that. But for somebody that is sitting in a cubicle working for somebody else, it goes back to the abundance, right?
Free yourself of that. Create the opportunity for yourself to be far greater than you ever thought you could be. And that's where I think that society-wise that we have created limitations on ourselves and put boxes around ourselves, is take a chance. You only live once. Take a chance. You never know what you're going to be able to accomplish unless you try. Risk it. Go for it. You'll land on your feet. You'll find another gig if you fail.
But for me, I've had some ups and downs to this journey. And the biggest compliment I get to this day is, good for you for sticking to it, not giving up. Just keep on going. You can go back and find story after story. I think JCPenney, filed bankruptcy three times before JCPenney became a store. There's a lot of failures that go into it. And you can't look at it as a failure. You've got to look at it as opportunities to learn. I just encourage people to go give it a shot. Come up with a dream, dream big and go for it.
Community Callout
My girlfriend. She owns an optometry business in Santa Monica. She has been amazing to help me with my mindset and thinking more abundantly.
Dean Innis - Your Best Life Now
He is the founder of a motivational company that helps you discover yourself. Dean has been instrumental in giving me a hand.
Man, there's been a lot of people on the way that helped support me through this journey.
I could go on for hours, people that have invested and not really expected a return, which have been patient for me with that. There's a lot of people that I could give praise and thanks to for their support.
In Closing
KLS wants to thank 4 Humanity Baby Products and CEO/Founder, David Williams, for today's "Together Talks" feature. Follow along for their journey with their social handles below!
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