A Houston grandmother’s arthritis inspired a million-dollar idea 

Eighty kids signed up.

Becca Davison had expected maybe 15 when she volunteered to run the entrepreneur’s club at her daughter’s Houston elementary school. But word got out that the teacher was a local founder who turned a homemade prototype into a million-dollar business, and the cafeteria filled up fast.

Davison bootstrapped the course, just like her business. And, by the end of the year, Davison and the kids had built a school gear e-commerce store, packed real orders with real order slips, and held a pitch competition judged by local business owners.

There was one moment during the pitch competition that stuck with Davison. A girl got up to present her idea, and it was received with skepticism.

“People were giving her a hard time,” Davison said. “I was like, look. I have a product that more than half the world doesn’t understand and thinks is super weird. You’re not trying to sell to everyone. She needs to find her niche, find her customer, just like I had to do.”

That ‘weird product’ is UnbuckleMe. A small, C-shaped lever that slides over a car seat buckle and reduces the force needed to open it by more than 50 percent. It retails for about $15.

In 2016, Davison was on maternity leave when her mother, Barbara Heilman, offered to watch the baby a few days a week. Heilman lives in the neighborhood. It was a perfect arrangement until she tried to take her granddaughter somewhere and could not press the little red button on the car seat buckle. She has arthritis in her CMC joint and car seat buckles require nine pounds of force.

Heilman had spent 20 years as an occupational therapist rehabilitating patients with hand disabilities. She treated the car seat buckle the way she would treat a patient: identify the problem, then build a tool to solve it. She melted old splint material in a frying pan, stretched it until it cooled, and fashioned a type-two lever that looked like an old-fashioned nutcracker.

“Within a week she just happened to mention it,” Davison said. “She was like, ‘Oh, by the way, I solved that car seat problem.’ She had made this little peg thing and she’s like, ‘If it breaks, I might need to make another.’”

Davison saw her mother’s solution as a product immediately and filed patents.

Davison launched her own website and started looking into Facebook ads and running the numbers. UnbuckleMe retails for about $15. Shipping a single unit costs around $6. Customers do not buy a basket full of car seat tools. They buy one.

“What am I going to pay, five bucks to get you to come to my site and then offer free shipping because otherwise you won’t buy it?” she said. “We’re talking about pennies.”

But she kept coming back to something simpler. She was a new mom with two kids. She bought everything in the Amazon store. So did every other parent she knew. And people buy car seats in the Amazon store. “Early on I realized Amazon’s going to be a really scalable channel for us,” she said. “The traffic’s already there. All I need to do is be there. It’s an easy add to cart, if you’re already buying a car seat.”

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) gave Davison the freedom to run the business on her own terms. FBA stores, picks, packs, and ships orders and handles customer service and returns. Instead of picking and packing individual envelopes from her house, she bulk ships cases to Amazon’s fulfillment centers. The economics are completely different.

“I can bulk pack it in cartons and cases,” she said. “There’s a lot of economies of scale for me to do that B2B relationship with FBA versus me having to one-off pick and pack. I’m paying for the envelope. I’m paying to stuff it in the envelope. All of that adds up.”

The advertising took longer to figure out. Davison started running Amazon Ads, which helps sellers connect with customers as they browse and buy in the Amazon store, on broad car seat keywords. Over the last eight years she’s narrowed those campaigns to a tight set of terms she knows will convert.

“I’ve become very vigilant on profit extraction,” she said. “I don’t want to waste my money educating the market and then have everybody just click on it and leave.”

Then there is the part she does not pay for at all. Amazon’s organic discovery programs like Frequently Bought Together, bestseller lists, and Prime Day visibility started compounding on top of her paid efforts. “Amazon has a lot of programs that are organic and that are opportunities for me to surface my product,” Davison explained. “I’ve been able to cut my ad spend because of some of these programs that Amazon offers where they’re giving me visibility.”

For most sellers in the Amazon store, the holiday season is the peak. For Davison, it is back to school. July and August have been her biggest months for five years running. That is when new parents are buckling toddlers into car seats for the first time and grandparents are volunteering for pickup duty. The parking lot conversations, she said, do the rest.

“People are in their cars, they’re watching each other unbuckle, they’re talking to all the preschool moms,” she said. “‘What is that pink thing?’ We get all the influencers talking about back-to-school hacks.”

Davison is one of more than 75,000 independent sellers who surpassed $1 million in annual sales last year, according to Amazon’s 2025 Small Business Empowerment Report. In Texas alone, independent sellers sold more than 226 million items.

“I can put in the time I’m going to put in and my sales can continue to grow tenfold in the Amazon store without my time having to increase tenfold,” she said. “It really allows me to just scale without having to put in a ton more effort.”