Two Pocatello moms start businesses cleaning car seats and strollers
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POCATELLO – Two local women have both found a creative side-hustle where they tackle a problem they’re all too familiar with as stay-at-home mothers – messy car seats.
After seeing videos posted to TikTok about the idea, both Mariah Sparrow and Macey Sloan have started their own overnight car seat and stroller cleaning businesses, called Tiny Hiney Cleaning Co. and Happy Seats Co., respectively.
Despite operating in the same city, neither of them sees it as a competition.
“I have no problem with other people doing it because, you know, it’s not my idea in the first place. I took it from someone else too,” Sloan said.
“There’s probably even more coming, which is totally fine because there’s so many car seats, not one company could clean all of them,” Sparrow said.
Sparrow, mother of a 3-year-old and 6-month-old, and Sloan, mother of a 1-year-old, were thinking about what they could do to bring in extra income for their families when they came across TikTok videos about other mothers who had started their own car seat-cleaning businesses.
Sparrow, who worked in childcare before having her children, recounted looking over to her husband and saying, “Well, I like cleaning our kids’ car seats, and I clean family members’ car seats and stuff sometimes too. I could do that.”
“I haven’t heard of anyone in Pocatello and Chubbuck doing that, and it’s great,” Sloan recounts thinking at the time. “I really want to start something and see if it takes off.”
The two mothers then went to work on doing their research and starting their businesses, launching their Facebook pages around the same time, with Sparrow’s on May 31 and Sloan’s on June 3. In researching how to clean a car seat, they found each model of car seat to be a little different then the last one.
“I do have a lot of car seat manuals. Every car seat is different on how they can be cleaned,” Sparrow said. “But I knew I needed to make sure I had all the manuals on hand about the major brands.”
“Some are able to be machine washed, some are not. Some are able to be tumble dried, some need to be air dried,” Sloan said. “So before I even disassemble any car seat, I always find the serial number and I plug it into Google, and I read the instruction manual.”
Something tired, busy parents may not have time to think about is how cleanliness affects the safety of a child’s car seat. A car seat that has too much food crumbs, toys or whatever else ends up under the seats fabric could potentially interfere with the seat’s safety mechanisms.
Both mothers explained how important car seat safety is, and how they can ease the burden on parents’ minds by taking care of that. They both use mostly hot water and gentle soap, and other gentle cleaning products to clean the car seats and strollers.
“Yes, I opened (the business) to make money … but also, I do it for safety. I know a lot of moms who don’t know how to clean their car seats properly, or they don’t have the time to do it,” Sparrow said.
“When it’s clean, it’s safe,” Sloan said. “I just feel like it helps with the longevity of keeping your car seat safe.”
If you want to get a car seat or stroller cleaned, all you have to do is book a cleaning on either Sparrow’s or Sloan’s appointment page, and then leave the car seat or stroller on the porch that night, and expect it back on their porch in the morning.