BRITAX Creates Life-Saving Designs

BRITAX Creates Life-Saving Designs

My name is Janie Harms. I’m a mother of two. My son, Jake, is four, and my daughter, London, is two. It was just an ordinary day, it was clear. The sun was out. It was the morning time. I’m driving my son to preschool with my daughter in the car as well, and sitting in standstill traffic, I felt a big jolt in my car, and so I took my seatbelt off right away, and I turned around and I looked at my kids, just to make sure everything was OK with them. And my daughter was actually crying, and my son was a little scared but didn’t know what had happened either. And then that’s when I realized that a big semi-truck had hit the back of my car. It totaled my car. We went straight to the emergency room to get all of us checked out. (PAUSE) Thank goodness for the Britax car seats that my children were in; there was actually no harm to either one of them. A big drive here at Britax is the ability to keep kids safer while, they’re traveling in their cars and vehicles. It’s a real big deal. We do a lot of the concept ideation here. We do most of the engineering here, if not all. And then we do the testing here, and we do produce the product here. In a lot of cases for the seats, we’re the last person to touch the product before the customer. Great design will always be a competitive advantage in the marketplace, things that look nice and function well will always survive and succeed better than things that don’t look as good and don’t function as well. I think PTC Creo gives us that competitive advantage. We’re able to really push the boundaries on styling, and safety, and innovation, because of the tools that we have available to us. Because I’m getting very early into a surface model within PTC Creo, it makes changes that the engineers need to perform, easier to manipulate, because we’re working in the same environment. It makes product development much more fluid, and much quicker, and much freer then it could have been. And then for time management, it helps us avoid mistakes that we may run into otherwise, because we’re constantly evaluating what we have. It definitely wasn’t anything that I thought about, because as a new mom, you don’t -- there are so many car seats out there. You don’t know one from the other. But after being in this accident that I was in, I would never choose another one, My appreciation for what these engineers do is great. We have these complex assemblies, and everything has to mate up really close. And engineering is what brings that all together. There’s probably 100 to 150 parts that make up the Frontier 90. PTC Creo enables us to really predict how the final model’s going to function. And we can see that before we get out into the production floor. We want the products to be as safe as they possibly can be, but also to be as easy to use as they possibly can be, because the best car seat is a car seat that’s used often, and that’s used properly. Proper installation of the car seat is very important. But thank goodness for my husband; he read the directions thoroughly and put them in there just right so they did not move. This is the testimonial board, and customer service gets calls, emails, letters sent every day about stories that families have been in horrific crashes and their children have been protected. So this is a letter that has recently come to us from an individual that survived an accident. This is the picture of the vehicle that was mentioned in the story I’m about to read. My son and I were struck in a side collision by a drunk driver. We were both traveling about 55 miles per hour. The other driver was killed instantly. I have several significant injuries, but my six-year-old son, who was restrained in a Britax Marathon, escaped with bruises and stiffness. In fact, he was able to help me on the roadside and direct first responders to help me tell them where I was injured. I’m writing to say a big thank you to Britax for the quality of your car seats. Last night, my family, including my husband, myself, my 23-month-old daughter, and my three-year-old son were involved in an accident a mid-size truck heading southbound T-boned our car, spinning it 90 degrees. The impact point was at the door of my 23-month-old daughter, secured in her Britax Boulevard CS. Thankfully, the car seat did its job. I truly believe this car seat saved her life. We chose Britax because of your engineering and quality. Thank you so much for keeping my children safe It’s incredible that we’re able to do this for those families, for those kids. The stories of the children that have been saved and spared because of the product that we make. It gives you a lot of pride and a lot of drive in your job. Parents need to know and understand is that a car seat is the most important thing you can have for your children, is definitely not to be taken for granted by any means.

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