A Red Tape Nightmare For an Entrepreneur
How does a great entrepreneur get started? With a great idea of course! Kerri Smith had such an idea when she first invented the BellyRest. Kerri told TheBlaze.com: “One day, when I was feeling particularly tired of being tired. I thought, ‘What if I took this pillow, cut it in half, and attached the two pillows with a piece of fabric in the middle so that I’d have a pillow waiting for me on the other side?’”
And that was how Kerri’s “BellyRest” business came alive. “I slept better immediately. The pillows stayed in place when I rolled over, and it hardly took up any real estate in bed. Plus, I found that having a pillow behind me and in front of me supported my lower back and my belly at the same time, reducing my hip pain,” she writes.“It’s not rocket science, but to a pregnant woman who isn’t sleeping, it’s life changing,” she adds.
When then pregnant Kerri Smith first invented the BellyRest, she probably never thought she would wake up to a nightmare, a “red tape” nightmare that is. When Kerri first started selling her BellyRest online she ran straight into multiple government mandated “pillow tag laws.” Kerri was being forced to pay a pillow tag registration fee for the 15 states that required the law. Each state has a fee that ranges from $5 - $720.00. With additional fee’s added on by various states, Kerri was going to have to pay $4,660 just to begin selling her pillows. Kerri began to wonder what if other states begin to adopt this “pillow tag law?” If that were to happen Kerri began to realize her “BellyRest” business would be put to rest very quickly.
Kerri stated in an interview with TheBlaze.com “I’m all about consumer protection, but there has to be a balance.” Kerri soon decided to take matters into her own hands by launching the IndieGoGo “crowdfunding” campaign. The idea behind Kerri’s campaign was to sell enough pillows to cover the costs of the registration fees. Under today’s regulatory environment, Kerri’s video shows just how far an entrepreneur has to go in order to get a business started.
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