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Home › Dad of the Month

Shandley Phillips

By Kelly Burgess

Each month, iParenting.com spotlights a father who inspires and moves us, who embodies the qualities that we all admire in a person, a man and a father. Above all, the Dad of the Month is dedicated to his children. Rich or poor, famous or not, he shines as an example of what fathering is all about.

Shandley Phillips is a hands-on dad with big ideas and the initiative to turn them into promising products. Shandley is the founder and CEO of Kiley Madison, Inc., and father of (no surprise here) one daughter, Kiley Madison, 5, and Bradyn, 9 months. He also, along with his wife, Allyson, is the inventor of the Tilty, which truly is a better sippy cup. It's not their first invention, and it surely won't be their last, because when they see something that doesn't work quite like it should, they set out to make it better.

Soccer Dad

Phillips says he and his wife both come from a family where good ideas were shared and celebrated. In Phillips' case, he thinks his dad could have been a great inventor himself if he'd had the time.

"I remember growing up thinking my dad was the smartest guy I knew," Phillips says. "He always had great ideas and I think the only reason he didn't pursue them was because he was a single dad and his focus was on making sure my sister and I were raised right. He didn't want to take the time or money away from us."

Phillips still lives in San Diego, where he grew up. He met Allyson in his first year at UC Irvine, when she was still a senior at a local high school. He eventually graduated with a degree in economics from San Diego State. That degree was actually a backup plan, as his first love was soccer. He played professionally for about five years, but the league he played for struggled financially.

"I would like to have played soccer for a living, but I didn't make a whole lot of money doing it," Phillips says. "It was while I was playing soccer that I got into doing programming for Web sites because I could do that both from home and while I traveled with the team."

That last year of his professional sports career Phillips suffered a foot fracture and when his daughter was born he decided to stay home. He would care for his daughter until his wife came home from work at 1 p.m., and then he'd go to work in his home office. He worked on a Web collaborative that eventually turned into his own business.

But he was always interested in seeing other people bring their ideas to life and he wanted nothing more than to do the same.

Birth of a Business

Even as college students and before they had kids, Phillips says, he and Allyson would often discuss new products and ways in which they could have been made even better. Soon after Kiley was born, they took their first step toward becoming baby-product moguls by inventing the "Ki Kover," a cover for the Baby Bjorn baby carrier. It did well, but shortly after their product debuted, Baby Bjorn came out with their own product, which made the Phillips' version obsolete.

They were casting about for another idea when, one day, Phillips watched his daughter, then a toddler, drinking from a sippy cup. "She was sitting on a tile floor and had her head tilted back as far as she could to get the drink out," Phillips says. "I was worrying she was going to fall backward and hit her head on the tile floor, and then I started thinking about some of the issues we were having with her trying to teach her to drink from a cup, because she thought she had to tilt everything back like that, and I realized that was how she thought she had to drink. She was being taught wrong from the beginning."

Try Shandley Phillips' recipe for Orange Berry Smoothie!

Phillips and his wife started brainstorming a way to make drinking from a cup with a lid more like drinking from a real cup. They also started doing research and found that many experts already disliked sippy cups for a variety of reasons, one of them being the issue that Phillips had noticed with the exaggerated drinking motion. Best of all, they started drinking from sippy cups themselves and were surprised at how difficult it was. Traditional sippy cups also require a lot of suction to get liquid out, making them nothing but "glorified bottles," in the words of one dental expert, and the drinking spouts can be difficult to clean.

Thus was born the Tilty. It started off with drawings, many revisions to the idea and the hiring of engineers and developments of prototypes. That's when they knew it was a viable idea and decided to go for it. The result truly is a better sippy cup. The Tilty is made from 100 percent environmentally friendly materials that won't leech into the liquid – and thus into your baby. When the baby or toddler drinks, a drop of liquid is expressed from the valve as soon as it touches the child's lips, so he or she learns to drink just as he will when he's drinking from a real cup, so there's no "learning" to dump the cup upside down to drink.

Balancing Act

Phillips says he has a lot of ideas and sketches for other products that they plan to add to their line. "Being active parents, we look at what we have and how we can make it better, or we think about things we wish we had to make our lives easier or just to work more efficiently," Phillips says. "One thing that's important to both of us is to share our lives equally, both in our work and in raising our family."

Phillips and his wife still work in shifts so that one of them is always parenting. He makes up time later, when the children are in bed, putting in more hours on the computer or in the business into the late evening. As a very involved dad, he has a few tips to pass on to other parents, just some things that he thinks are important or have worked for him:

  • Try to put yourself in your child's little world. "Everything is so much lower for them, and so much harder," he says. "You may hand them something that's light to you, but for them it may be like lifting weights."
  • Try out your child's stuff. Like Phillips did when designing a sippy cup, see for yourself if the products you buy for your children and use or expect them to use are easy or hard or comfortable or whatever.
  • Dishware is not a toy. Don't give your kids sippy cups just to keep them quiet and entertained. When they can toss them around at will, they don't make the connection that they can't do that with every cup. Also, they learn to drink for comfort and not just because they're thirsty. Think of it as the equivalent of learning to eat when you're hungry.

For more information on the iParenting Media Award-winning Tilty sippy cup, visit www.tiltycup.com.



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