Student Engineers/Entrepreneurs Develop Child Safety Device

Buckle Blocker (Michigan Tech)

Two engineering students at Michigan Technological University in Houghton are taking to market a device they built to keep children from unbuckling their seat belts. Collin Veele and Alex Cotton say they have secured a provisional patent and trademark, and now their Buckle Blocker is ready for the marketplace.

The Buckle Blocker, which would typically be used with a booster seat, covers the release button and is too strong for a child to push back. With the Buckle Blocker in place, only the parent can release their child when the car is stopped. The device thus eliminates unnecessary stops for the driver to reattach the seat belt while on the road.

Veele and Cotton started with raw sketches of the idea — based on eyewitness accounts of kids acting up in their parents’ cars — and advanced to a 3D model. “We were able to start showing people what it looked liked and give them a tangible feel of the product,” says Cotton. “We kept revising the design, and now finally have a functioning, injection-molded prototype.”

The duo had initial success on campus when they won Michigan Tech’s elevator-speech pitch contest in 2009, a competition sponsored by the Entrepreneurs Club of Michigan Tech, the School of Business and Economics, and the Institute for Global Leadership and Entrepreneurship. The $1,000 first prize helped get their project off the ground.

But Veele and Cotton also discovered the entrepreneur’s road can have some obstacles. Their campaign on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter raised only about $4,600 from 57 backers, well short of the $11,000 goal. They had hoped to use the funds for the injection molding, tooling, and component costs needed to produce an initial inventory.

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