Sundar Ramanujam Nadimpalli, Founder, Nu Dzine

Tuesday November 16, 2010 , 4 min Read

We have all seen the acrobatics performed by parents when carrying their children on two wheelers. The folks at NU DZINE designed a new innovative product for children’s safety while riding on two wheelers. They were inspired by the Duppatta that one of the cofounder’s sister used to tie around her and her son while going on her scooter. Their product The Zine Zoomerz is a simple and yet highly practical safety harness which can be used for children between the age group of 2 to 7 years. The Zine Zoomerz is designed to be used on two-wheelers (scooters and motorcycles).We caught up with Sundar to learn more about NU DZINE and their products. Below is an excerpt.Tell us more about yourself and how the idea of NU DZINE evolved.

I am Sundar Ramanujam Nadimpalli and I am an automobile engineer by education, my business partner is a mechanical engineer.

About 2 years back we started thinking beyond where an employment with a company can take us. The only way seemed to own a company rather than be in one. Now just any company is not going to make the cut so we wanted to build an organization that makes products that really fulfill a need or two of consumers. The product has to have a meaningful function. The product has to be simple. The product has to be innovative. So Nu Dzine is about meaningful, simple and innovative products that will solve some problem very effectively.

So we set about making a list of products that we can make as a company. And the first product that came to our minds and which we also prototyped pretty easily was the Child Safety Belt. We designed it, prototyped it and got the opinions of some of our friends. Actually the idea of the product started a long time back when my sister had to take her son on a scooter. At that time we had tied a duppatta around her and her son to keep him from falling off. So we started thinking of products, this came to our minds first. So starting the beginning of the year, the product has so far sold about 210 pieces or so. We got some indirect advertising about the product when two reporters from Prajavani and Vijaya Karnataka wrote about the product in articles in the respective papers. This was in June and July. We are still getting calls with people referring to the article in the papers.How did you come up with the design?

The design evolved from a Duppatta that my sister used to tie around her and her son while going on her scooter. We took that idea and developed it in a way that more support and better holding can be provided for the child. We also incorporated adjustable straps for the baby and the adult so that people of different sizes can use the belt. Now we are improving it further to make it more user friendly and robust.

Has this product been tested?

We had approached BIS to check if this can be certified with an ISI mark. But since this is a new product there is no existing BIS standard to test this. We have done some load testing in house as per all the possible use cases and have found that it satisfies them all. Are products like these available globally?

Yes, there are similar products available in different parts of the world. Some countries have regulations for these, many don't.

How did you raise funding ?

Up and until this point we have self funded the venture. We are now seeking some funding from Banks to scale up our operations.

Some interesting links:

http://news.motorbiker.org/blogs.nsf/dx/young-motorcycle-pillion-riders-and-the-european-laws.htm

Which materials do you use?