Car Seat Buckle Magnets

Car seat harness straps get buried under the child upon leading into the car. This requires parents to dig under their child to find the straps which can be both uncomfortable to a child and potentially wake a sleeping baby. Car seat harness straps can get twisted which prevents parents from properly securing their child as the straps don't tighten down sufficiently. Car seat harness strap buckles can get hot in a parked car and can potentially burn a child.

In the beginning, we sketched hundreds of safety pins and lock/unlock possibilities. Some pins looked like a spiral cord while some looked like anti-theft tag pins found on clothing retail shops. We then made many prototypes through 3D printing technology and reviewed what worked and what didn’t work, and we also opened a test tool before getting into a real production tool to validate our design to make sure it functions as intended. We also interviewed many people who use baby car seats and gathered opinions and suggestions. At last, we worked with the lab to perform crash testing.

The product is currently being sold throughout the US and many other countries under Brica and SafeFit brand names. Parents all over the world praised how useful the product is and ease their struggles to find buckles under their babies, and some parents think it should come with every car seat sold. The product received an IDEA (International Design Excellence Award) Bronze Award in 2018 and IDA Award Silver in 2019.

There are many safety pins on consumer products, but there are not so many designed for babies. We found there are many diaper pins in the market, but most of them had the same mechanism and dated design which hadn’t been progressed in a long period. We created a simple button that can work as a safety feature which needs to be pressed down while a user disengages a pin out of its locked position.