Entrepreneur Regan Merka’s Burleigh Wagon, a product initially designed to suit her family’s needs, is capturing attention overseas, particularly in the US.

The Burleigh Wagon transports up to four little people and a serious amount of gear, and can be used for anything from a beach day to a trip to the farmer’s market. The wagon is designed with safety and convenience in mind, but its original purpose was to help Regan’s family make trips outdoors easier and more enjoyable.

“My husband Nathan and I came up with our concept back in 2017,” explained Regan.

“We have a little girl with some sensory issues and it was a struggle for us to go places, especially like the beach, where it was too hard for her.

“She didn’t like the feeling of being strapped in something like a traditional pram and she couldn’t see out in different directions.”

Having done an online search and not finding what they needed, Regan and Nathan engineered their own solution.

“The walls of our wagon are specifically designed a little bit lower, so that kids feel that freer feeling,” Regan said.

A hybrid of a wagon and a double pram, the Burleigh Wagon features an under-seat ice chest and detachable side rail. A key differentiator from other wagons available locally is that it also meets Australian pram safety standards, with features such as a 3-point safety harness and parking brakes.

Since its launch in September 2019, the Burleigh Wagon has become a viral sensation, with social media videos of the wagon attracting millions of views.

The wagon has been in such high demand that Regan had to work with web developers to create a dedicated US website to handle the large volume of traffic from interested customers, which was causing a system meltdown.

“Our AUS website wasn’t even loading. It was getting up to 30,000 people from the US a day from those videos,” Regan said.

“If you go on Tik Tok or Instagram, you’ll see there’s a couple of videos that have gotten up to 16 or 18 million views.”

These have generated an enormous backlog of enquiries and potential sales.

“We’ve got about 20,000 Australian email subscribers, which we thought, Oh, that’s pretty okay for the last four years.

“But we’ve actually just passed that in US subscribers, who have subscribed to get their hands on our product once it goes live.”

Regan and Nathan Merka have built a wildly successful business from their base on the Gold Coast

Regan and Nathan are now working on launching in the US market in the next few months, where they anticipate it will be significantly easier to convert their waitlist to purchasing customers.

“Growing up in The States – my husband and I are from there – everyone or everyone’s family has a wagon. I think they really understand the product and the price point a little bit better than [the Australian] market,” Regan said.

“Some people are happy to pay $1,000 for a pram here. But a wagon, they don’t look at the same way with the same value.

“Here, there’s not a lot available. You’ve got a little Kmart one that people put their stuff in and sometimes their kids.

“But it doesn’t have any safety. Or it says right on the box, do not put your children in. That’s kind of the only thing really available versus ours at $500.”

She said the difference in price has occasionally been a barrier in the Australian market.

“Because there’s not as much social proof of the product in the market. Whereas [in the US], some of the other wagons that we’ll be competing against that do have the safety features are about 700 to 1000 US dollars.

“We’re hoping that that really helps us – that the US market really gets the value.”

They have also found growing demand locally from families receiving NDIS support, and Regan and Nathan have welcomed the opportunity to support other families with children with special needs.

“It is definitely a big passion of ours,” Regan said. “Once we found out that we could offer a service to parents like ours, we added a whole section on our website where they can say exactly what they’re seeking, and then we liaise with them.

“Whether it’s a carer, like a plan manager, for example, or if they’re self-funded, we help them – we send over an invoice and help them through the NDIS process.”

“We actually had a mum last night, whose little girl’s [disability is very restricting], so they couldn’t go places like the beach with a pram and they couldn’t stay very long.

“With something like our product that they actually can hang out in and be included with their other family members or other friends, it’s really nice to be able to offer that.”

Being based on the Gold Coast has been a positive for the company, which at the moment is only the two of them.

“It’s excellent. We’ve had a lot of support here that otherwise we probably wouldn’t have had,” she explained.

“[There are] great opportunities for grants here. It’s quite easy to facilitate if you need a bit of cash flow, a bit of help. We’ve had a lot of good opportunities.”

This included launching with a popup store in the parking lot of Stockland shopping centre in Burleigh, which rapidly led to an increase in orders and a move to permanent premises to enable warehousing of stock.

Early on, Regan and Nathan participated in the SEQ Manufacturing Course, and benefitted from mentorship when they were first exploring expansion into the US.

“We actually got a lot of connections through [the course]. They were helping us start that process off. But then, unfortunately, the programme got cancelled once Covid hit.”

They have also found a sounding board in their friends who run Gold Coast-based skincare business, esmi, who were “giving a little bit of advice here and there”.

Since launching, sales have increased year on year. The company is at the point where they run out of stock during their busiest periods, Christmas and mid-year.

Regan said they are open to investment in the company to help them meet the enormous demand coming from overseas, as evidenced by the torrent of subscribers to their new US-only website.

“Our emails kind of went through the roof!” she said. “It’s exciting, but I was like, how many people are we actually going to convert?

“Is it one per cent? Two per cent? Five per cent? Because that’s a huge amount of cashflow!”