It was the end of a camping trip in 2023, and Karmyn and Daniel Roberts had a three-hour drive ahead of them. In the back seat: their 20-month-old, who’d been vomiting all night.
“We had a long drive home after our camping trip with a sick child and no way to sit in the back and hold a bucket for him,” Karmyn says. “With our fingers and toes crossed that we wouldn’t have to clean vomit off our child, out of the car seats and off the carpet mid-trip, we thought, surely other people have this problem? What can we do about it?”
They brainstormed the entire way home. By the time they pulled into the driveway, the idea for the Chundee existed.
From idea to reality
It took another two years to make it real. The Chundee, which launched in September 2024, is a silicone bucket bib designed for kids too little to hold a bucket themselves. It features a deep, wide catching pocket at the front that holds a litre of liquid, with a lip on the inside to stop splashback. It packs down small and comes with a waterproof storage bag, which anyone who has ever cleaned a car seat at a highway rest stop will deeply appreciate.
The launch itself was not a fairytale. Karmyn, who’d worked as a youth worker, had no business experience and assumed a nice-looking website would be enough.
“We had one sale on launch night, which was from my sister-in-law,” she says. “Despite the slow start, we knew we had created something that solved a very real problem for parents. We just had to figure out how to get it in front of them.”
49.9 million views later
What worked, six months in, was showing the problem rather than the product. Karmyn started posting videos of the exact moment every parent dreads, then revealing the fix. One of them hit 49.9 million views. Chundee has since shipped to 30 countries.
The messages that came with that attention weren’t only from parents of car-sick kids. Families of children with disabilities got in touch, as did parents of kids going through chemotherapy and children with medical conditions that cause vomiting.
“I have always been in the area of helping people,” Karmyn says. “Straight out of school I did a traineeship in youth work, went overseas and worked as a live-in support worker for people in wheelchairs and worked in the social work space up until I had children. It just seemed natural creating a product where I could continue to help people but just in a different capacity. Our aim is to make it as easily accessible to those who really need it.”
Not just for sick days
The Chundee has also found a second life as a crumb catcher, perfect for snacking in the pram and messy dinners at home.
“I had a customer send me a photo of her daughter eating a cheeseburger,” Karmyn says. “She said every time she took a bite she would carefully put the cheeseburger in the bottom of the bucket, finish chewing and then pick it up again. It caught all the crumbs too.”
For any parent who has ever white-knuckled their way through a road trip with a queasy kid in the back, or scrubbed mystery substances out of car seat crevices at a servo, this one’s for you.
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