Kitchener woman counting on curiosity of expecting parents
Test tells sex of baby sooner than ultrasound, she says
KITCHENER — Remy Warren believes the seemingly irresistible urge among pregnant women to know the sex of their unborn children will propel her new business into the black.
In mid-February, the Doon South resident plans to launch a product called GenderSense on Amazon.com.
It is a self-administered test that reveals the sex of a developing fetus just 10 weeks after conception.
Normally, ultrasounds cannot accurately see the sex of a fetus until after 20 weeks.
About five minutes after the product is mixed with a pregnant woman’s urine, it changes colour. Orange or yellow means you are having a girl. Green means boy. Warren says it is accurate 80 to 92 per cent of the time.
Warren heard about the test kits when she was pregnant with her first child. She bought one in the United States and used it. It turned green right away, and sure enough, she had a boy. She used the tests kits again for her next two children, and the results accurately predicted the sex of her children. She has three boys.
“So I was kind of passionate and excited about the product from the get-go,” she says.
Warren developed contacts in the feminine hygiene sector of the consumer products market while working for a Kitchener company called Diva International, which makes reusable “cups” that collect a women’s menstrual blood.
“I was in charge of presenting their products to the buyers in the U.S. at Target, Walgreens and stores like that,” says Warren. “I started getting a lot of contacts.”
She left Diva to become a consumer products broker. A few years after her youngest son was born, Warren was thinking about those test kits again.
She bought another one and hired a laboratory in California to find out what it is made from. After finding out what the ingredients were, Warren learned that mixing and processing were expensive.
So she negotiated an agreement with the origi-
nal manufacturer, and rebranded her Canadian version of the product as GenderSense. There is no product like this available in Canada, she says, and she wanted to launch it here.
Warren says national retail chains in Canada wanted $30,000 to $40,000 up front to stock GenderSense. In addition to that “listing fee,” she would have to sell the product to national chains at a deep discount so they could make their desired profit.
Instead of racking up those costs, Warren decided to first launch on Amazon.com and sell to American consumers for US$45. Amazon takes 25 to 30 per cent of sales, but there are no big upfront costs.
She says she will use the revenue from Amazon sales to cover the listing fees of retail chains in Canada and to finance a big production run of GenderSense so she is able to quickly fill an order from a big, national chain the U.S.
“Because Amazon is such a large beast in the States I think that is where a lot of my opportunity to start will be,” says Warren.
She recently received good news from Health Canada. After a formal review of the product, the federal department says it will not be classified as a medical device. That saves a lot of time and money. GenderSense is not regulated as a medical device in the U.S. either.
Warren has enough confidence in her product that she is now planning a Canadian launch. She needs packaging that includes both English and French, and needs to have bilingual support services in place for customers.
“Within six months I am hoping to be able to launch within Canada as well,” she says.
After graduating from Western University with a degree in administrative and commercial studies, Warren worked in consumer packaged goods for companies big and small — from cereal maker General Mills to Diva International.
“I feel the stars kind of aligned for me,” says Warren.
Her company is registered as Remy International Consumer Products.
“Even though it is a weird, niche product, it is a lucrative opportunity,” she says.
“I think it is about 86 per cent of couples in North America who are pregnant want to find out the sex of their baby before they have the baby.”