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With baby video, family business born
By ROBERT FARLEY © St. Petersburg Times, published October 8, 2000 CRYSTAL BEACH -- When Liz Iftikhar's brother decided to give her 6-month-old daughter Sabina a video, mom was aghast. "I was horrified with the concept of a video for babies that young," Iftikhar said. She told him, "I can't believe you bought me a video." And when Iftikhar popped the language development tape into her VCR, she was "pretty much underwhelmed" by its content. Sabina, on the other hand, was transfixed. Her eyes followed the images intently. Iftikhar describes herself as a restless stay-at-home mom, and her mind started clicking. Maybe I could make a video, she thought. A better one. And so Baby BumbleBee was born. Now a year old, Iftikhar's young company has won a favorable rating from Parenting magazine and sold about 65,000 videos. The offices of Educational Products for Infancy Inc., which does business as Baby BumbleBee, are at the top of a spiral staircase in Iftikhar's Crystal Beach home, in a third-floor loft that affords spectacular views of the Gulf of Mexico. A few computers and phones, desks and filing cabinets make up the operation. She selects the content and hires professionals to shoot and edit the tapes. The distributor is in San Diego. Iftikhar, 37, begins her work day after she drops her two children off at school. She finishes up around 6 p.m., and often goes back to work after the kids go to bed. She gets help with invoicing from a part-time employee. And recently she took on help to rework her Web site (http://www.babybumblebee.com). The concept of the language development videos is simple. Like flashcards, the videos pair words with corresponding images. For example, after introducing the word "dog," several species of dogs are shown. Long before babies actually speak, Iftikhar said, they begin to build a vocabulary. "They make a connection between words and objects, and words and actions," she said. It's called verbal labeling. At age 1, an average child understands about 25 words, she said. The five Bee Smart Baby videos each introduce 23 new words. The theory is that if kids learn more words through the videos, when they do begin to talk, they're ahead of the curve. Having a larger vocabulary also allows children to fill in the blanks and figure out the meaning of new words. "It's like a puzzle," Iftikhar said, "the more pieces you have in place, the faster the others fall into place." The baby video market is growing fast. An entire genre is based loosely on the Mozart Effect, the premise of which Iftikhar summarizes as: "Listen to classical music and your kid will be a genius." "The Mozart Effect got sort of blown out of proportion, I think," she said. Nonetheless, classical music plays in the background of her videos as well. Last year, the first volume received a Parents Choice Award and an A rating from Parenting. A client, 23-year-old Katherine Coward of Fayetteville, N.C., said her son Isaac has been watching the videos since he was 6 months old. "It's something he really pays attention to and enjoys watching," she said. About 75 percent of the words Isaac, now a year old, uses are words from the tapes. "The tapes are obviously effective," she said. "I was surprised." Louise Emerson, who founded a school for children with autism in Los Altos, Calif., recommends the videos for any parent, but especially for those who have children with autism. "It immediately struck me how perfect they are, in design and concept for people with autism," Emerson said. The pace of the tapes is good, she said, and the material is presented in an uncluttered way, against a neutral background. The videos are sold predominantly through specialty stores such as Zany Brainy and Babies R Us. More recently, Iftikhar has begun to target independent toy stores. Next year, Iftikhar hopes to double sales. She already has added a new title to the Baby BumbleBee line: Baby Math. And next on Iftikhar's radar, science videos for kids 4 to 9. The success has not been bad for a woman who, strictly speaking, does not have a high school diploma or college degree. Iftikhar left high school a year early to go to college at Sweetbriar College in Virginia. She attended a year, then moved home to New Jersey, where she worked in the family business, a chain of computer stores in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And she took some classes at Princeton University, where she met her husband, Naveed. Although now beginning to gather momentum, Baby BumbleBee got off to a rocky start. The company had to overcome an early disaster when its first big customer, Learningsmith, a toy education retailer with a store in Countryside Mall, went out of business. The company had ordered 5,000 videos, and Iftikhar's company ended up being paid just 25 percent of what it was owed. That was a big financial hit for the fledgling company, but there was a silver lining. Early on, brisk sales of the videos at Learningsmith piqued the interest of other retailers. Iftikhar has learned a few other things about business along the way. Perhaps the most disturbing, she said, is the importance many retailers place on the cover of the videos. "Perception is 90 percent of the ballgame," she said. Most of the children who appear in the videos are child actors, or at least child actor hopefuls looking to add a line to their resume, Iftikhar said. But the cover of the first video is graced by her own daughter, Sabina, sporting a bee costume. "I shamelessly commercialize my own kids when need be," she said. -- Staff writer Robert Farley can be reached at (727) 445-4185 or farley@sptimes.com.
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