Featured – Page 58 – Business Plus Baby

August 2, 2010August 1, 2010

I Started a Business With a Baby: Alexandra Atkins of The Ultimate Baby Shower

Tell us a little about your business

My business is The Ultimate Baby Shower Ltd (TUBS), which is the first company to focus on the British baby shower market. Rather than copying the way the U.S. are doing it, I have thought about what the British public would like. This involves cosy afternoon teas with girlfriends, swapping hints and advice, spoiling mummy to be, eating elegant baby themed cupcakes and cookies – supping the odd glass of pink champagne! The decor is elegant and sophisticated with butterflies, parasols and baby themed accents. I recognise the fact that new mummies should be celebrated and need plenty of hints and advice before baby arrives. It is a fun affair and watching the opening of the cutest of baby gifts goes down very well too!

What was your job before starting your business?

I used to work as an Environmental Consultant and travelled to Europe working on projects for oil and gas companies. I thought I would continue to do this once my baby arrived and employ a nanny to look after her while I worked but as soon as I saw my daughter I knew I couldn’t be away from her so I set up on my own.

How did you go from your old career to your new business?

I always thought I would continue my job because it is what I worked towards throughout university and it was the career path I always wanted. However during my maternity leave I handed my notice in because I couldn’t hand my daughter over to a nanny while I spent all day at work or travelling. I wanted to enjoy her as much as I could.

What were your reasons for starting a business?

I needed to use my brain and keep busy. I found I was spending time visiting other people with babies, going to baby groups, having lunch with mums etc. I felt I was being absorbed into a world of babies and I needed my own focus. I’d always been busy studying or working and I couldn’t cope with not having this organisation anymore.

Did you use any childcare?

To begin with I only worked during nap times – forming my ideas and getting things down on paper. I also worked evenings. After about 6 months (when my daughter was a year old) I had a part time nanny who worked 3 mornings a week. I spent this time creating my website, setting up the business etc. I worked 3 mornings a week, during the afternoon nap and in the evenings between my daughter going to bed (6pm) and my husband getting home (9pm). If my daughter was unhappy at any time when the nanny was with her then I would sit working with my laptop on my knee while she played on the floor with the nanny.

How did you get your business idea?

I have cousins in the U.S. who had numerous baby showers and kept asking why I wasn’t having them. I always thought they were rather tacky and not my kind of thing although I loved the idea of getting the girlfriends together to offer hints, tips and advice to mummy-to-be whilst eating cupcakes and having a glass of champagne. I found a way to create baby showers with elegance and style.

What were your challenges and how did you overcome them?

My biggest challenge has always been, and still is, splitting my time between my work and my children (I now have 2 daughters age 6 and 3). I’ve worried whether my work is taking my time away from my children. If my children have been unhappy then they have always come first, meaning my business has suffered along the way and taken much longer to get to where it is now. I closed the business for 12 months after my 2nd daughter was born because I couldn’t cope with a new baby, a 3 year old, a house move and the business. We had just moved to a new house in a new area away from friends – there was no child care so I needed to be with them full time. I worked evenings to keep things ticking over but that was all I could do. I never wanted to compromise being a mummy. Even now I work 3 days a week and every evening when they are in bed.

What training, information or advice did you need to get started?

I went to Business link to begin with but because my business was unknown to anyone at the time (baby showers weren’t really heard of in the UK back in 2005) it wasn’t much help. It’s been a huge learning curve for me because I didn’t know where to get help from and didn’t seek advice about running a business. I jumped into it, thinking I could do it and I did. Organisation and determination have been key to me succeeding. My business has changed massively along the way and isn’t what it was 5 or even 2 years ago. It has evolved as I have gained experience from my customers. I have responded to their needs and they have helped form the business.

If you could give one piece of advice to a mum of a baby or toddler starting a business, what would it be?

If you’re starting a business and find you can’t cope because of demands from your little one then put the business on hold, sort out what needs sorting out, and pick it up again. The good thing about starting a business is that you’re in control of your time and where it is spent.

July 30, 2010July 25, 2010

I Started a Business with a Baby: Laura Morris of Rentabuggy

Having had a long career in Insurance I left for a break and whilst looking for another job I fell pregnant with my daughter. I decided I didn’t want to go back to a full time job but I was one of these people that needed some buzz as well as being a full time mum and I can never sit still!

When my daughter was about 18 months old, I met up with a friend for lunch and a bit of shopping and she had a son the same age. Slight problem was she forgot her pushchair. We joked that wouldn’t it be a great idea if there was a place where you could rent one for the day? That comment sat with me for near enough 6 months!

Lying in bed one night I couldn’t stop thinking about it, ideas were flooding out of me and I kept thinking ‘I might of hit on something here’. I got up and wrote down the ideas. Within a week I had built my first website and had my first order and what a buzz!

The company was launched in October 2008 right in the first talks of recession and I did argue with myself whether it was the right time to launch into a new business but I kept coming back to the thought that by providing a service where people could rent a pushchair monthly would help ease families cash flow.

Rentabuggy now provides top selling pushchairs on a monthly basis and we also provide holiday rentals including travel cots, highchairs, sterilisers and more. We cover both services Nationwide and the unique point of the holiday rentals service is we deliver your products direct to your place of stay and then collect them when you have gone taking the stress out of travelling and packing the car trying to squeeze everything in.

Rentabuggy has grown in 18 months and the beauty of spending time with my daughter when I choose is something I would not want to give up now but that doesn’t mean to say it has not been hard work. I can honestly say it is only in the past 18 months that I have retrieved a good work v life balance. I love the fact that I get to see the stages of my daughter growing and we talk daily about work and she knows it brings in money to give her clothes and buy food. I want her to grow up understanding the value of money and how you have to work hard to achieve it but also to see the benefits it can reap in. For example last week I was on a BBC2 programme and I was a judge on a panel, she loved it that her mom was on TV!

Once piece of advice I would give to anyone looking to start a business is go for it. If you don’t you will only wonder ‘what if’. One thing with business is it is a huge learning curve. Don’t worry if you get something wrong, pick up and move on. We only succeed by learning our mistakes.

July 27, 2010September 30, 2013

Running an Online Shop: Pros and Cons

Today I’m introducing my first ever male guest blogger Trevor Ginn of HelloBabyDirect.co.uk! Dadpreneur Trevor is going to give us the basics on running an online shop. It would be great to have a few more blokes around here, so if you’re a dad who started a business to spend more time with your baby or toddler and would like to be featured on Business Plus Baby then drop me a line! Anyway, over to Trevor…

The huge amount of money which parents spend on products for their newborns inspires many parents to think about setting up some sort of baby focused retail businesses. The baby sector is an attractive option for would be entrepreneurs as it has been hardly been touched by the recent downturn. Recession or no recession, people still have babies.

An increasingly popular option is to ignore the traditional brick and mortar shop in favour of selling online. This strategy is in many ways sensible as, while the rest of the retail sector is in the doldrums, online sales are still experiencing double digit year on year growth. Buying online has great advantages for parents in terms of convenience and increased product availability. In addition, the barriers to entry online are much lower than traditional retail. So how easy is it to set up an online baby shop? This post looks at the pros and cons of this business opportunity.

Pros

Easy to start

Sites such as eBay and Amazon make it easy to start selling online. These marketplaces have a huge, international user bases which allow sellers to get off to a flying start. Very limited technical knowledge is required, although a basic understanding of HTML can help to make listings more visually attractive. There are also no set up costs to sell on eBay or Amazon.

For people with more technical know-how, setting up a transactional website is also not as difficult as it used to be and there are lots of solutions available off the shelf at a very low cost or even for free. OS commerce and Magento are popular open source solutions for creating an online shop.

Cheap

An online retailing business can be started on a very limited budget. All that is required is some stock and an online presence on eBay or Amazon or your own website. This is all easily achievable for around £2000-5000.

(Note from Helen: If you want to know how to do it for less than £200, check out How to start an online shop on a budget)

Sales 24-7, worldwide

Unlike a high street shop, sales on the Internet can be made 24-7. The Internet also opens up a business to an international audience. Around 20% of eBay sales are international and the current strength of the Euro makes UK prices attractive to people in the Eurozone, even when additional postage is considered.

Not limited by geography

An online retailing business can be run from any location and an expensive high street location is not required. Many sellers work from home, although this may become difficult as sales grow.

Cons

Admin intensive

Running an online shop is hard work. Creating product listings are time consuming and maintaining the product catalogue is a never ending job. The proposed VAT increase, for example, will mean the retailers must reprice all their products. In addition all sales should be packed and dispatched on a daily basis.

Customer service

There is no getting away from it, customers can be a pain. Being a retailer involves dealing with the general public and so it is important to be patient.

Solitary

Running an online retailing business involves very little face to face customer contact and so can be a little lonely.

High competition, low margins

Let’s face it, the web is where people go to get bargains and consequently competition is fierce. Margins in online retail tend of be lower than on the high street and so retailers need to compensate by selling more.

About the author

Trevor Ginn set up and runs the online nursery shop HelloBabyDirect.co.uk and you can read his blog at www.trevorginn.com

July 26, 2010July 24, 2010

Why is it always about mums?

I began this website because I thought starting a business would give me the flexibility that my job couldn’t. Looking around, I saw lots of other new mums struggling with the same things as me – not wanting to miss their child’s first few years by working full-time, not wanting to spend a fortune on childcare and being disappointed by the part-time jobs on offer. And I wanted to help.

Helping people take back control over their working and family lives has to be a good thing, doesn’t it? For cultural and financial reasons, it tends to be the mum who works part time and manages the family while dad works full-time. But surely we should be moving towards a more equal sharing of these responsibilities? By encouraging mums into business, am I keeping mums in the home and dads in the office?

I hope not, but I do have good reasons if I am. Starting a business and becoming a parent are both tough learning curves. Doing both together is enough to make your head spin. Changing the traditional roles, starting a business and becoming a parent all at the same time is a step too far for most of us! Plus I’m blogging from my personal experience – I would love my husband to work less than full-time and spend more time with our children, but we haven’t found a way to do it yet. When you’re starting out in business and parenthood at the same time it helps if there’s at least one steady income in the family. And it takes time to get a steady income if you’re building up a business.

There are dads out there who have started businesses so that they can see more of their children. A few people (including my brother, in fact) have asked me why I don’t include dads in Business Plus Baby, so I wanted to redress the balance a bit and introduce Dadpreneur Week. The trouble is I haven’t exactly been inundated by guest posts from dadpreneurs! If there are any men out there who have started a business so they can spend time with their babies or toddlers and would like to be guest bloggers, please do send me a message!

You’ll be able to read a post from my one and only dadpreneur guest blogger tomorrow – I hope to feature a few more blokes around here soon!

photo credit: jessica.garro

July 22, 2010July 21, 2010

Why Jen Started Her Family Friendly Business

If you’re like me, you’ll look on mums with school age kids with just a bit of envy. Now I know that working around school hours has its own problems. But at least by that stage I’ll have from 9.30 to 3pm free every day and I won’t be squeezing my work into nap times. Sounds wonderful!

But life doesn’t always go so smoothly, as Jen Sargeant of Jen’s Nappy Cakes has found.

“I started this business as my son Jimmy has autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and many conditions within that spectrum. He also has terminal Crohn’s disease and colitus. He goes to a special needs school and because of his conditions we are at the hospital regularly for check-ups. I just found it completely impossible to get a job to work around my family and because my son wouldn’t go to a carer.

He was diagnosed with ASD at 7 years and terminal Crohn’s disease and colitus at the age of 9 years, so we have had a lot of time in hospital and I have had to concentrate on him keeping well. I fit the business in around my family when my son is at his special needs school.”

Jimmy is now eleven (that’s Jimmy in the picture) and Jen also has a daughter, Cheree, who is fourteen. Jen has always been creative but stumbled across nappy and towel cakes on American websites when she was looking for a business idea.

“I decided to do the nappy cakes and occasion cakes as they are not very well known in this country as yet and I want to change that.”

If you haven’t come across nappy cakes before, they look like celebration cakes, but are made up of the bits and pieces you might give as a gift to a new or expectant mum. Jen doesn’t stop with cakes though, here’s her sock bouquet.

Jen also makes arrangements for charity auctions and raffles as she believes it’s good for businesses to support others. And she sent Danni Minogue a nappy cake when her son was born last week.

“My tips for other mums are to work at it every day, put the word out about what you do to as many places as possible, network like crazy, swap links with as many companies as possible. BE PATIENT!”

And her plans for the future?

“I want to eventually open a shop, as at present I work from home and my creations are everywhere! I would love to achieve is to have the nappy cakes and any occasion cakes in the large retail shops, which is something I’m working on at present.”

Jen, we wish you every success!