Game Changer: The Remarkable Story of Caroline’s Cart

This is an excerpt from “Game Changer: The Remarkable Story of Caroline’s Cart, “ by Drew Ann Long with Bethany Bradsher, Whitecaps Media, 2017.

— by Drew Ann Long with Bethany Bradsher

As one winter day ran into another, I was living for the moment when I would get the phone call from Indesign letting me know the prototype they were creating was finally complete. I was still meeting with my idea team, but we reached a point where we decided we really couldn’t do anything more until we got the prototype. So we waited.

To fill the time, I worried about the cart’s prospects once we did actually have one we could push around. My extensive research of other entrepreneurs and their paths had convinced me that a mom from Alabaster, Ala. trying to create and sell a product to retailers was both unprecedented and probably insane. I would vent to my husband David about it.

“All of these other people who create products sell to the consumer. No one that I know of has ever done this before. What am I thinking? What if no one buys it or I can’t even get an audience with the grocery chains?”

Always the steadying force, David would tell me, “You don’t even have a prototype yet, sister. Calm down. You’re on step six thousand, and you should be on step two hundred.”

Then in late February 2011 a phone number popped up on my screen with an Indianapolis area code. On the other end was an Indesign engineer telling me I was free to drive up there anytime to pick up my completed prototype! I wanted to jump in the car and take of right then and there, but that was unheard of at that stage in my life. Before I could even think of leaving town, I had to do hours of preparation—writing out Caroline’s medicine and therapy schedule, Matthews T-ball schedule and Mary Grace’s dance schedule for David; washing school uniforms; arranging rides with neighbors; and making sure everyone was straight on homework and projects.

I recruited my sister Pam to join me for the trip. We took the back seats out of my van to make room for the cart, and we headed for points north. I know I was a ball of jumpy excitement all the way up to Indiana, and at some level I really couldn’t believe it was happening. We checked into a hotel on March 1, ready to get up bright and early the next morning to drive to the Indesign office.

When I think about the emotions of that morning, on our way to Indesign, and when I first laid my hands on the prototype, I feel like the English language doesn’t have sufficient words to describe the way I felt. I was about to lay eyes on something I had been talking about, praying about, agonizing over, and dreaming of for years. Those years had been marked by plenty of setbacks and we almost abandoned the cart altogether, but that morning every trial, every discouragement, seemed to evaporate. It was a tremendous feeling of accomplishment to know we finally had a prototype, but also humility that God had actually let us get this far. I felt boundless gratitude and joy, even as I had this surreal feeling that I was watching someone else in my body.

We arrived at Indesign, got our visitors’ badges, exchanged pleasantries, and were ushered into a room where we were told that the cart was just on the other side of the wall. After what seemed like forever (but was really only about a minute), they walked us into a large room, and there she was, in all her three-dimensional glory—an actual Caroline’s Cart! I was speechless. I felt like I was looking at my fourth baby, and I certainly had the labor pains and the scars to show for it. The cart that greeted us on March 2, 2011, was very similar to the one that today helps thousands of special-needs families have an accessible shopping experience. It was painted a light orange color, with a gray seat and handles that swung out to make it easier to put a passenger into the seat and then pivoted back together when it was time to push the cart. It had a five-point harness, a basket behind the seat for groceries, and a tray on the bottom to hold more items.

One of the first things I did was sit in the cart to try it out. We pushed it around the office, talked about the cart’s specifications, and finally after thanking the Indesign engineers profusely for this miracle, wheeled it out into the parking lot to load in my car for the drive back to Alabama. I don’t remember exactly what Pam and I talked about on that trip, but as we covered those five hundred miles I probably turned my head around five hundred times just to get a glimpse of this beautiful rolling object.

When we arrived home that evening, David met me in the garage to help us unload the cart and we maneuvered it into our dining room. Right away we strapped Caroline in and pushed her around. I have dozens of pictures of that historic moment—Caroline Long in the cart that not only bears her name but we believe firmly could be her lasting legacy. I stood amazed at God’s faithfulness, and I had a glimpse of the difference the cart could make for families across the nation and the world. Standing in our dining room, settling Caroline in for that short ride, we were seeing the unfolding of something that was truly bigger than ourselves.

I was still writing an endless succession of checks, but at long last we had something to show for the expenditures. At some point that spring, one of our children asked, “Where are we going for vacation this summer?” David responded, “We’re going to go to the dining room and ride around in the cart.”

For now, trips out on the pontoon boat and outings to the neighborhood pool would have to be vacation enough. And as exhilarating as it was to finally have possession of the prototype, its daily presence in my house somehow made the other tasks ahead of me weightier. We weren’t playing around at creating a product anymore. A cart existed, and it seemed to shout at me to do something that would get it out of my dining room and into some grocery aisles.

Excerpt from “Game Changer: The Remarkable Story of Caroline’s Cart, “ by Drew Ann Long with Bethany Bradsher, Whitecaps Media, 2017.

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[ Photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash ]