Work it, MOM

Meet the mompreneurs. They’re full-time, stay-at-home moms with big ideas. For them, babies always come before business, but when the kids go down for naps these mothers start working it. Here are the stories of five women who work wonders at home and in the marketplace.

Illustrating childhood

As Sarah Jane Wright began to decorate her daughter’s nursery, she found a need for a new style of artwork.

“I wasn’t seeing a revival of vintage trends,” the Orem artist says. “What I was finding was extremely fancy and expensive or loud, bright and fun. I love both, but I wanted to see something else in the nursery or playroom.”

So she headed to the library. Her book of choice? “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Making Money with your Hobby.”

“The first thing it said was, ‘Before you start a business, you must have your life in order,’” Sarah says. “With two little babies, my life wasn’t in order.”

Sarah spent the next three years researching, studying and making plans for her future business, Sarah Jane Studios.

“I knew I’d need to start with confidence,” she says. “I wanted to start strong, so I made that my focus.”

After designing, drawing and printing a solid collection of fanciful, storybook-illustration-themed artwork, Sarah e-mailed everyone she knew and contacted about 15 bloggers to let them know she’d soon have her work for sale. Three weeks later, she launched her product line on Etsy.com, a popular online marketplace for handmade goods.

“Before I even officially had everything set up on Etsy I had made five sales,” she says. “My first day I sold 60 prints. It was kind of overwhelming, because I was still working out of my bedroom.”

Now, 10 months later, Sarah still works from her home, although the drawing and printing take place from her home office, not her bedroom. Her prints continue to sell, and she’d love to expand her business — unless it means leaving the home and her two toddlers.

“I’m doing as much as I can within my home,” she says. “As soon as it gets bigger, I’d have to be less of a mom, and I want to be a full-time mom.”

Being a full-time mom for Sarah means not working when her children are awake. She uses naptime as her creative time, and also fills orders and keeps the business organized after they go to bed at night.

“I used to get frustrated, thinking I needed more time,” she says. “But when I’m focusing on my own children I’m actually growing as an artist, because I create for children. It has only expanded my style and my creative endeavors. The moment I sense I’m neglecting my children I feel extremely hypocritical because I’m in a children’s business. It’s a constant reminder of where I need to be.”

Sarah launched her business in October 2007. Check out her work at www.sarahjanestudios.com and www.sarahjaneblog.com

Fine Design

As a business major at BYU, Cynthia Winward learned a valuable lesson.

“I had an accounting professor who said, ‘If you do what you’re passionate about, the money will follow,’” the Provo resident says. “I never forgot that. Now I’m doing something I’m passionate about and everything is just falling into place.”

Cynthia’s passion for sewing began before she hit her teenage years, when a church leader taught her to sew in exchange for babysitting hours. When Cynthia began raising her own children, she used her hobby to create clothing and blankets for them.

“Then I started decorating my house by making my own curtains,” she says. “And I slip covered all my furniture. People started asking, ‘Oh, you make curtains? Could you make me some?’”

So Cynthia gave it a shot, creating custom window treatments for local homeowners and designers. She enjoyed the work but found she had too many requests to keep up with. After sewing 72 sets of sliding glass door curtains for a nearby complex of condominiums, she’d had enough.

“There were deadlines and I just couldn’t do that kind of volume anymore,” she says. “I had little kids, church obligations, a normal life.”

Cynthia also grew tired of working with fabrics and patterns selected by others.

“Sometimes the fabrics they were working with were horrific,” she says. “So I started thinking about sewing out of fabrics I like. I figured I could make six or seven things and just see if they sell. I decided I’d only make what I would want to put in my own home or give as a gift.”

She launched her online store, Meringue Designs, and those six or seven things — including pillows and birthday banners — sold in one week.

“People were buying them on the first day,” Cynthia says. “I feel really fortunate that here I am picking fabrics I like, and it turns out other people like the same thing!”

Sales have remained steady since she opened her Internet shop, and Cynthia has learned she can sell as many products as she can produce.

“I have the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other,” she says. “The angel says, ‘Your children are only little once,’ and the devil is saying, ‘You’re a business person and you can make a lot of money doing this.’ So I have to choose my priorities.”

Cynthia’s first priority is to be a full-time mom to her three children, so she sews just one to two hours each day while her two older kids are in school. Her youngest accompanies her to the sewing room, where she colors and plays with her toys and Cynthia’s fabric scraps.

“After that I have to walk away and shut the door,” Cynthia says. “My definite rule is once my kids get home from school I don’t open that door. They get my complete focus and attention.”

Cynthia has been selling bags, pillows, quilts, aprons and clothing at meringuedesigns.etsy.com since August of 2007. Read more about her on her personal blog at deepthoughtsbycynthia.blogspot.com.

The Big Idea

As a mother of three and a former junior high biology teacher, Rebecca Davidson has purchased her fair share of markers. And as the wife of an entrepreneur, she is always on the lookout for a great idea.

“When I was teaching school, the lost marker caps drove me crazy,” the Orem resident says. “As a mom, it’s the same thing. I buy a pack of markers and a week later they’re dry.”

With the marker mess constantly nagging her, the idea of the Cap Trapper was born. Rebecca calls it a simple solution for a universal problem.

“It’s kind of a ‘duh’ idea,” she says. “It’s easy enough that anybody can understand and relate to it. It’s a unique design so it grips caps of any size and any shape. It makes markers more efficient, it prolongs their lives, and it provides portability — you can throw it in your purse or put it in the car.”

With her prototype perfected and her patent pending, Rebecca ordered her first lot of packaged Cap Trappers. And then she started blogging.

“I started connecting with all these mom blog sites, since there are tons that review products,” she says. “It’s been exciting, because everyone who sees it loves it.”

And though her products are selling and being met with rave reviews, Rebecca says she still doesn’t feel like a business owner.

“I just feel like a mom who had an idea,” she says. “I think it’s so useful, and I want to share that with other people.”

Rebecca shares her story and sells her marker-saving Cap Trappers at www.savvymaycreations.com and on Amazon.com.

Fighting Portion Distortion

After earning a degree in health education and working as a nutrition counselor for the state health department, Amy Roskelley, of Lehi, had all the answers for families and their bad eating habits.

“I could see that everyone was too busy to eat at home and to get out and exercise,” Amy says. “People think it’s faster to go through the drive-thru than to come home and boil some angel hair pasta. Then when I had my own kids, I realized how much easier it can be to give them junk food.”

Her education and career had taught her that children develop lifetime eating habits by the time they turn 10. So in an effort to start her three young ones on the right path, Amy launched what she now calls their “journey to becoming a super healthy family.”

One of her habit changes was not so much about the food she served her children but the plates she served it on. Amy found that she was better able to teach proper portion sizes by giving her kids sectioned plates.

“A balanced meal should be half fruits and vegetables,” Amy says. “I didn’t want my kids to grow up with mac and cheese as the main part of their meal with a couple pieces of broccoli on the side.”

And then she took the sectioned plates one step further.

“I thought, ‘It sure would be nice to have pictures on the plate,’” Amy says. “That way, the kids are the ones to say, ‘Hey mom — I need more vegetables on my plate.’”

Amy searched out an illustrator and manufacturer, then ordered her first batch of 2,000 Healthy Habits Plates. She promotes her product through her Super Healthy Kids blog and Web site, and the positive feedback has been pouring in.

“I’ve had great responses from people,” Amy says. “They’ll tell me their kids are searching the cupboards to add more fruit to the plate. They like how it encourages balance.”

Amy shares her best nutrition tips and sells her Healthy Habits Plates at www.superhealthykids.com.

A Solution In A Snap

After raising nine children, Lisa Pinegar has had plenty of experience installing car seats. But it never became a task she enjoyed.

“Every time I would put in a car seat it would drive me crazy,” she says. “Moving it from car to car, it seemed like I was always having to put it back in when I was in a hurry.”

With this thought weighing on her mind, the Provo resident happened to catch an episode of Oprah where a mom shared her story of losing her child after not installing a car seat correctly.

“This gut wrenching feeling came over me and I thought, ‘That could have been me,’” Lisa says. “I sat there and cried because of her. How many times have I said, ‘I’m just driving down the road, I don’t want to put the car seat in.’ It was just consuming me.”

And then, the answer came to her. She ran to a novelty store to collect the items to assemble a prototype, then spent the night researching materials on the Internet. The result? The Snap-n-go — a handy tool to ease the process of threading a seatbelt through the narrow openings in a car seat.

The process was time consuming, Lisa says, as she sought out the best materials and created attractive packaging, all while being a single mom of nine.

“I just took an idea and ran with it,” Lisa says. “I had no idea how to do it because I’d never done anything like it. But things just kept falling into place.”

And after launching the Snap-n-go at a baby expo and on her Web site, things continue to snap into place.

“The light clicks on in people when I show them the product,” Lisa says. “I can see it’s a universal concern. Seeing appreciation from other people has been wonderful. It’s energizing.”

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