Gabby Goodwin on GaBBY Bows

Hi, I'm Gabby Goodwin. I am 14 years old, and I'm from Columbia, South Carolina. I am the CEO of Confidence and the inventor of GaBBY Bows, the first and patented double face double snap barrette. And how they work is they have two faces. You can see the design both ways and have teeth and craters to trap the hair. You wrap the hair around the center strip and snap one end closed, then snap the other end closed. And it does not come out. So no more lost bows. You will not lose a bow, never, again, never. And with our patented barrettes, our plant-based hair products, and other solutions, we are able to remove stress in the hairstyling process and that moms, dads, and girls can cherish their time together doing hair. 

The whole Process, you know, started at the kitchen table. We would use the barrettes that we already had and kind of evaluate them and see what was wrong and how we can make it better. I, you know, came up with our ideas of using two faces. So you can always see the design rather than when it turns around and you just see the strip. So being able to have that, but also being able to, you know, maintain the hair, hold the hair in place. That's why there's teeth and craters on each side of the face, to really stand with the hair in place. So it's like a Z shape. 

What made me decide to start my company was me just losing barrettes all the time when I was little, uh, my mom would, you know, spend 15, 20 minutes doing my hair in the mornings, and then she would drop me off at school and then pick me up and find that half of my bows were gone. And then my hair was a complete mess and she was not only wasting time in the mornings, but also wasting lots of money. And she was going to the store every single week to buy these barrettes. 

I was super excited to, I guess, just create a product. I didn't have to sell it or distribute it out, but I did want to solve the problem. And then I was able to help many girls as I started the business when I was seven in 2014. And we've been in business for seven years. We have both the utility and design patents, and then there's another patent as well. We have for another product that we submitted,  but just being able to actually protect our product is something that we're really, um, focused on, especially since we created a product that nobody else has done before. It's the first of its kind, it's really unique. So we really focused on that. You know, we probably did not in the beginning, we did not have, you know, the money to actually have a full, you know, design and utility patent. And, uh, so we just went with the small provisional patent at first to make sure that we at least had some protection, on our products. So people didn't, you know, in the early stages of our business, steal our product and steal our idea, but as we grew, we were able to get the design patent about one year or two years into the business. And then our utility three year, three to four years into the business. 

Our website where you can get Our products, see if there's any stores near you that carry our products. And many other things that, you know, are represented by our business, whether that's, you know, social media, media, you know, anything that you would need from our website, you will go to Gabbybows.com that is Gabbybows.com, and you can find many different things are made, you can also contact us, you know, have any, uh, questions or anything like that, social media or GaBBY Bows on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, there's many different things that we're on, but, you can also find those handles on our website as well.