Cool Baby: Fake Baby Beverage Insulator Creator Seeks Funding on Kickstarter

Courtesy Simon Philion(NEW YORK) — Have you ever wanted to express yourself through your grown-up drinking bottle?

If you answered yes, you may get your chance, thanks to an advertising writer from Brooklyn who developed a hands-free beverage insulator that looks like a baby.

Dubbed the “Cool Baby,” the doll-like baby figure is hollow, and comes with a bottle and straw to be placed inside the baby. It also comes with a harness to allow the baby to be strapped to the wearer’s chest.

Asked how he came up with the idea, Simon Philion, 32, said it grew out of a project he was working on at his previous job. The client had asked for an “iconic vessel,” so Philion said he took the approach of devising something that spoke of “unorthodox convenience.”

“And then I’m walking about Brooklyn all day and you see a lot of new parents out here” whose babies are “all strapped to the front of people’s torsos with different elaborate harness systems and the one thing they all have in common is that it places their baby’s head directly in kissing distance of their mouth, so what a wonderful place for a beverage,” Philion told ABC News in an interview on Sunday.

That project never made it to the client, “but I loved it and I loved it and it haunted my dreams and my every waking thought and it occupied me until I finally saw it through and here we are,” Philion added.

With funding from an investor, he developed a prototype and launched a campaign on Kickstarter to raise $70,000 to do an initial round of manufacturing. As of Sunday night, he had collected nearly $14,500.

Several humorous sketches showing how the Cool Baby may be used are included in a video on the Kickstarter page.

“Here’s hoping that we get this thing funded in the next five days,” he said, referring to the campaign’s deadline.

Philion said he has worn the Cool Baby in public to strong reaction.

“You do get constant double and triple takes and then right after that, people decide whether they love you or hate you. It’s always one of those two — it’s never objective curiosity,” he said.

If he meets his goal and sends the Cool Baby into production, each insulator would retail for about $35, he said, adding that it could be used by anyone but likely would very readily appeal to sports fans.

“I think football fans in particular, because you watch their behavior and they are wonderful, they — they can’t wait to one-up one another with the insanity of their fandom, you know, so I figure this is one way to use the baby, dress the baby up like your team … and the baby becomes a teammate for you at the same time,” he said.

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