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When Claudia Fier Weber ’91 was pregnant with her daughter Chloe, she experienced a problem that many pregnant women have – she couldn’t find pants that stayed in place.
While most suffer through the ill-fitting garments, Weber got creative. She invented bottomsUp, a pair of stretchy fabric bands that attach to the side panels of a woman’s bra and the waistband of her pants or skirt. They are discreetly worn under clothes and can be used to help keep pants up in the front or back, wherever they’re falling down.
“Finding pants that stay put is a problem common to many pregnant women, whether it’s early on and their bellies don’t fill out maternity pants, or late in the ninth month when their fully-grown bellies push waistlines out of place. I asked friends and salespeople in maternity stores if anything existed that could help [and nothing did], so I took it upon myself to develop the concept. bottomsUp are an incredible simple but effective solution,” says Weber.
Weber has only recently begun marketing bottomsUp, but the product already has been featured on the popular shopping blog “Cool Mom Picks” as pick of the day. The site also ran a feature on Weber as its “momtrepreneur of the month,” calling her product “the pregnant woman’s dignity saver.” In addition, ivillage.com included bottomsUp in its “Stuff We Love” newsletter.
Four stores in Brooklyn, N.Y., carry bottomsUp. Direct sales primarily go through Weber’s web site, and while she has just begun exploring additional outlets, including national chair stores and online retailers, she’s received orders from stores in Sweden and Spain.
Weber credits Lafayette with giving her the skills to think creatively and be successful.
“I truly believe I benefited from the broad liberal arts education I got at Lafayette,” she says. “As an American civilization major with a concentration in English, I was able to take a variety of courses in English, sociology, business, history, etc., without pigeonholing myself into a particular career. I’d say that creative thinking probably contributed most directly to my being able to see this product through to completion with zero knowledge of the retail manufacturing market. Plus, I’ve been able to tap into my network of Lafayette alumni, from patent attorneys to stay-at-home moms to small business owners for help along the way.”
Since graduating, Weber has worked in a corporate setting, including proposal writing for a healthcare company in Washington, D.C., where she lived with two Lafayette alumni attending law school there. She then returned to New York City, where she worked in corporate communications and marketing for several different companies, including KPMG, then at public relations agencies GCI Group and Ogilvy. She then returned to in-house positions at Unilever in Greenwich, Conn., where she started in corporate communications and ended as public relations manager for Dove products.
“After having my daughter, I decided not to return to corporate life but still wanted to work part-time,” she says. “So bottomsUp seemed like a good opportunity to create my own business while solving a problem for pregnant women, including myself, everywhere.”