The origin object was not glamorous. It was not even three-dimensional. Lindsay deOliveira opened Microsoft Paint and drew a pacifier that could come apart. The nipple would be replaceable. The larger pieces could remain. Different babies, with their inconvenient habit of having preferences, could try different shapes without consigning another whole pacifier to a drawer. On a computer screen, the pieces obeyed. Manufacturing would prove less courteous.
By then deOliveira had spent roughly a decade as an optician. She knew about fit, small measurements and the peculiar seriousness of objects worn on the body. She did not know how to tool a consumer product, negotiate a regulated category or persuade a factory that an unfamiliar design was worth making. This is the misleading charm of a simple object: the fewer pieces it has, the easier it is to believe that each one will cooperate.
The first idea came from waste and repetition. Her daughter rejected pacifier after pacifier. DeOliveira watched complete products get discarded when the variable that mattered was the nipple. She imagined a system with three interchangeable shapes and components designed for cleaning and replacement. The concept made intuitive sense at home. Turning intuition into inventory required a much longer apprenticeship.
“What started out as a concept for convenience ended up being a safety mission.”Lindsay deOliveira
The expensive distance between a sketch and an object
DeOliveira founded Soothe Beginnings in 2022. She initially imagined the launch in months. Then she encountered the calendar of physical goods. Custom molds alone cost tens of thousands of dollars. A prototype is not merely a rough draft when its user is a baby; it must pass through testing, compliance work and revisions before it can become something a company sells.
One early manufacturer said yes. The word brought relief, which made it tempting to stop asking questions. The resulting mold did not work. Money disappeared into a lesson, and the company changed factories. DeOliveira later offered an unusually practical reading of the setback: sometimes a no is useful, because it arrives before the invoice.
Her schedule expanded from a sprint into a long seminar. There were new technical terms, new people to vet and fresh reasons for a promised date to move. “Whatever timeline you have in mind, double it… then double it again,” she later advised first-time founders. The line is funny because it is an accounting method disguised as gallows humor.
The optician’s habits proved portable. Eyeglasses look finished only after a sequence of quiet adjustments: frame, lens, bridge, temple, wearer. DeOliveira’s new product also depended on relationships among small parts. The design described in her patent uses a shield, an annular sleeve, a removable nipple member and a cap that secures the assembly. The prose of a patent is admirably immune to romance. It tells you where the rib meets the notch. It does not tell you how many doubtful afternoons preceded the notch.
A founder assembled by introductions
The myth of invention prefers one mind and a closed door. DeOliveira’s progress was more social. In early 2023 she entered the StartUp Columbus incubator. She has credited the group, and particularly Ben MacMinn, with giving shape to her education as an entrepreneur. MacMinn introduced her to Gregg Warren at the Advanced Technology Development Center, Georgia Tech’s startup incubator.
That introduction became another, and then another. Advice led to investor conversations. A private frustration became a pitch. By November 2023, deOliveira was a BizPitch Columbus finalist. The following month Soothe Beginnings joined ATDC’s Accelerate portfolio, reportedly becoming only the second Columbus-area company in the program.
She did not pretend to arrive with a founder’s natural fluency. She practiced. She learned the financial trap that confronts many makers: investors ask to see proof, while proof requires expensive tooling that the founder needs investors to fund. Software may begin with a laptop and a long weekend. A custom mold is considerably less moved by enthusiasm.
DeOliveira’s answer was to make herself easy to remember. On pitch stages she acquired the nickname “the lady with the nipples,” a phrase that removes all danger of a forgettable follow-up email. The joke served the explanation. Her product was not another color or pattern; its central difference was the ability to change that one component.
The television classroom
The Blox, an entrepreneurship competition series, offered a larger stage and a camera. DeOliveira described the filming as nerve-racking at first. The useful pressure was compression: when a product has taken years to develop, the founder must resist narrating every hinge in the plot. Television asks for the sentence that survives the edit.
She won Season 12. In public interviews, she said the experience also connected the company with a six-figure investor, a manufacturer and prospective collaborators. The result mattered, but so did the forced clarity. Her pitch had moved from an account of parental frustration to a legible product thesis: keep the parts that still work, replace the part that needs to change, and make the choice straightforward.
“Get comfortable being uncomfortable.”DeOliveira’s rule for building through pivots
The phrase sounds like generic startup advice until placed beside the failed mold. Comfort, in her case, would have meant trusting the first confident supplier or holding fast to the first launch calendar. Discomfort meant admitting that money was gone, the partner was wrong and a new search had to begin. Stubbornness helped only when attached to a willingness to replace the method.
Soothe Beginnings is founded and product development begins.
StartUp Columbus, an early prototype, BizPitch finalist status and ATDC Accelerate follow in sequence.
DeOliveira wins Season 12 of The Blox while continuing manufacturing work.
She expands her public work through parent education, registry consulting and podcast appearances.
The U.S. patent issues, a continuation application publishes and the patented system reaches customers.
The patent package arrives
In late 2025, the United States Patent and Trademark Office listed Patent No. 12,491,140 for “Infant pacifiers with interchangeable nipples,” with deOliveira as inventor and Soothe Beginnings as assignee. A continuation application published in March 2026. In one photograph shared on LinkedIn, founder and daughter opened the patent package together.
There is a pleasing symmetry to the scene. The original customer for the idea was present for the document that formalized it. Yet the patent was not a finale. By 2026 the company’s online store offered the starter kit, replacement nipples and subscription purchases. A patent protects an idea; orders test everything around it, from packaging to fulfillment to whether a stranger understands the proposition quickly enough to click.
DeOliveira had also widened her work. She earned certifications as a baby registry consultant and breastfeeding counselor, joined Gold Coast Doulas as a registry consultant, co-created Rockstar Dad Academy with her husband, and developed educational material for families moving beyond pacifiers. These projects share an operating instinct: reduce the heap of choices to a usable next step.
That instinct may be the actual thread connecting opticianry, product design and consulting. Each begins with an assortment that can bewilder the buyer. Each becomes useful only when someone asks what fits this particular person. DeOliveira’s modular product is a physical version of the same answer. Variation is not a nuisance to eliminate. It is the premise.
Small parts, long consequences
Cataula is not the usual setting in startup fables. DeOliveira is a New England transplant who lives near Pine Mountain, west of the Atlanta capital circuit and close enough to Columbus for its founder network to matter. She toured distribution facilities with her daughter in a stroller. The image says more about early-stage operations than another photograph of a laptop beside tasteful coffee.
Her story does not offer the clean gratification of overnight invention. The sketch did not become a product because it was obviously clever. It became a product after the first timeline failed, after a mold failed, after a factory relationship failed and after the founder learned which questions should come before yes. The years between Paint and patent are the substance.
There is also a joke hidden in the engineering. The product’s virtue is that it comes apart, while the company exists because deOliveira kept assembling a network: MacMinn to Warren, Columbus to ATDC, competition stages to investors, consultant to manufacturer. The pacifier is modular. So was the path.
“Sometimes a ‘no’ is actually a blessing,” she said after the factory change. A founder is expected to turn rejection into fuel, a cliché that makes both rejection and fuel sound suspiciously clean. DeOliveira’s version is better. A no can save the cost of a false yes. It can stop the wrong part from being locked into the mold.
The finished object is small enough to fit in a hand. Its story contains a decade of prior work, a child’s preference, a crude drawing program, incubators, pitch rooms, a television set, patent claims and one ruined mold. That is the secret life of ordinary products. They sit quietly on a shelf, concealing all the people who had to learn how to make them real.