OWLET JOINS THE FAMILY

We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Owlet – a next generation baby monitor. Leveraging lightweight, comfortable and safe wearable technology, the company aims to bring peace of mind to new parents around the world.

Their first product is a baby sock embedded with sensors that monitors breathing, heart rate, skin temperature and sleep patterns. Relevant data is sent to the caregiver’s smart phone and is easily monitored with automatic alerts.

We first met the team at R/GA Accelerators first Demo Day in NYC last month. We were immediately impressed with the team’s vision and their personal passion for the space. They were solving a real need that the founders themselves identified with as new parents.

We were impressed with Owlet’s CEO, Kurt Workman – who has the markings of a great leader – quietly thoughtful, poised, smart and clearly driven. His vision for the company and the path to execution was compelling. Our team shares his belief that at some point in the not-too-distant future, every baby coming home from the hospital will be wearing a monitoring device of some kind. The team he has assembled brings considerable experience to the table and an outstanding capacity to develop and refine the very product that could one day become the de facto standard.

We see this as an emerging market with tremendous opportunity. There are a multitude of factors that make us believe this is the right time for a company like Owlet. The capacity of electronics continues to rapidly expand, the cost of hardware continues to go down and the proliferation of wearable technology in other categories is helping educate and socialize this type of device with consumers.

Furthermore, there was a clear appetite for this type of product in the numerous customer interviews we conducted within our own networks. Parents with young children shared with us their personal anecdotes – the stress of bringing home a newborn and the numerous sleepless nights they had worrying about their baby’s comfort and safety. Mothers-to-be were emphatic in their desire to purchase the device on pre-order and healthcare practitioners talked about the incredible data that could be amassed and leveraged for medical research.

BrandProject is thrilled to be a part of the journey. There’s a lot to do and we have every confidence that the team has the resourcefulness, fortitude and passion to do big things.

Read more about Owlet on TechCrunch, and follow the Owlet team on Twitter: @owletbabycare. You can also pre-order Owlet: http://www.owletcare.com.