BABY KNOWS BEST: Even as critics clucked on the sidelines, consumer demand powered a Utah start-up to infant-care stardom.

• Author: Dark, Stephen

One chilly February morning in 2014, five men met in a late 1970s diner called George in the heart of Queens, New York. The five young cofounders of hi-tech Utah start-up Owlet, ordered their eggs and pancakes and then listened somberly to CEO, Kurt Workman as he broke down the nightmare their business had become.

"We're basically out of money," Mr. Workman said.

They had spent a year and a half developing a smart sock that would alert sleeping parents when their newborn was having difficulty breathing. But in their rush to market, they'd made some fundamental mistakes and the prototype didn't work. They'd burned through the $100,000 start-up accelerator Techstars had given them and pre-order sales revenues. Now they had to tell customers they didn't know when they could ship what they'd paid for.

"How long can everyone go without a paycheck?" Mr. Workman asked.

He was most concerned about Zack Bomsta, his chief technology officer. "If we lose Zack, this is never going to come together," Mr. Workman thought.

He needn't have worried. Mr. Bomsta and his wife were die-hard adherents to the wearable baby monitor. That's because they had experienced a night of their two-month old vomiting and struggling to breathe. Shortly after that painful night, Mr. Workman pitched the concept to Mr. Bomsta of a consumer wireless version of a pulse oximeter-hospital equipment that monitors your vital signs. "The second he mentioned it, a big light went on in my head," Mr. Bomsta says.

Everybody wanted to keep going, to keep working. One chipped in two months, another six months. Three weeks later they returned to Utah County to work on a new prototype. By then their luck had changed, Owlet secured $2 million from investors.

Four and a half years later, the company is worth $100 million-plus and in 2017, it was named one of Forbes' 25 next billion-dollar startups. It outstripped its own growth expectations thanks to a passionate consumer demand that has thrived in the face of technical teething problems and medical naysayers. And in part it has Utah, with its Mormon-driven culture of large families, to thank for its success.

Utah leads the nation when it comes to new ideas for infant-care businesses and Beehive customers have got to be the biggest purchaser of the sock on a per capita basis, Mr. Bomsta says. "What better place to start a baby business than in a state that's a trend-setter for all things baby?"

Such success, however, hasn't come without a...