Boon: Rebecca Finell and Ryan Fernandez Make Splash in Bath Toy Market

Boon Rebecca Finell and Ryan Fernandez Make Splash in Bath Toy Market
As business partners go, Rebecca Finell, 30, and Ryan Fernandez, 31, are a match made in heaven - or at least church, where they met in 2004 when their children began playing together.

Fernandez of Tempe, then a sales and marketing executive at Intel Corp., was looking for a business venture and needed a product to market.

Finell of Ahwatukee, a student in Arizona State University's industrial design program, had a product to launch but no marketing expertise.

A year earlier as her junior studio project at ASU, Finell had developed the Frog Pod - a bright green, frog-shaped, wall-mounted device for scooping, rinsing, draining and storing bath toys.

The Frog Pod won the 2004 Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association Student Design Competition.

When they met, Finell and Fernandez were each about a week away from inking deals that would have taken them in different directions, but with the blessing of their families they instead co-founded Boon Inc., a Tempe-based company that creates children's products with a sophisticated sense of style.

Such products are a boon to parents, explained Finell, who designed the Frog Pod in part because she had a hard time finding both fun and functional "things that I would want to put in my house."