Two single mums fed up with their children continually losing their school uniform have created a barcode system to ensure it never goes missing again.
Selina Pawar, 36, and Tracy Baker, 43, were inspired to create the business after being told by their children’s school to look for a solution themselves.
The women, who work together as travel consultants, then delved deeper into the problem and discovered that children loose nearly £200 million worth of school uniform a year.
They then put pen to paper and set about designing their product.
After roping in help from a computer expert and sourcing an organic and water resistant material on which to print the labels they launched their business called Tagmykidz.
The system works by each child being assigned a unique number which is devised from their year and place on the class register.
This is then put on the barcode which is sent to parents and can be stuck or ironed onto their uniform.
The system comes with a free app that allows parents to scan uniform and find out exactly who it belongs too.
Selina, a mother-of-five, said: “I spend £700 a year on school uniform and from the first day of term I’m chasing it.
“I have been through the school system for years and three of my children are at the same school.
“Lost property doesn’t work, with our system in place we are not using names. Our system is done on blocks of numbers.
“When parents write their child’s name on uniform a lot of time they’ll just put their first name sometimes which isn’t much help.
“There’s also a safeguarding issue. If you’ve put a child’s name in their uniform and it says where they go to school you’re giving out a lot of information about them.
“Our system only contains numbers and there is no way of a stranger identifying the child from the barcode.”
Selina, a mother-of-one, said: “We were so frustrated and said to the school you need to do something about you lost property.
“They said do something about it so we did.”
They are now trialling their patented products at Broughton Fields primary school in Milton Keynes, Bucks,. where four of their respective children are pupils.
They plan to have special “tidy days” where all lost property is scanned and returned to the rightful child.
And they will even to give a free iPad to schools so children can learn to scan items themselves.
Having perfected the barcode system, the mums are now working on their next project – a tiny GPS tracker device that can be attached to a child’s clothing.
It will enable worried parents to know exactly where their offspring is at any moment.
For more information visit www.tagmykidz.com
