Entrepreneur Mom: Mother of Shayna, 16, Andy, 14, and Talia, 11; founder of PeoplePlatters, a decorative plate design and manufacturing company in Agoura Hills, CA. Number of employees: 3. Projected 2008 gross revenue: $150,000.
My story: As a stay-at-home mom of three with an unused law degree, I was searching for something that my carpooling, lunch-making, school-volunteering days were not offering me: a creative outlet. I found it in my kitchen cabinet, right where I store the cookie cutters. Wanting something unique for an upcoming school fund-raiser, I made clay figures from the cutters and glued them onto ceramic plates. Everyone loved them. One of the plates auctioned at the fund-raiser sold for nearly $2,000! Next I made a “grandparent plate” for my parents. Their friends started asking for them, and with each plate I gave away, I got requests for more. Soon both my friend and my husband said, “You should sell those.” And that, as simple at it seems, is how my hobby became my business: PeoplePlatters.
My decorative display plates—which are personalized with figures made to look like your family and friends, complete with charms like a cell phone or laptop—were popular in my expanding social circles, but I learned that word of mouth alone wasn’t enough to grow a business. In 2003, I put up a website, sat back and expected
orders to flow in. They didn’t. Once again a friend came to my rescue by telling me all about pay-per-click (PPC), a system in which you pay search engines each time they direct your target market to your site. It worked, and before long I had more orders than I could handle.
In those early days, I rarely stepped out of my kitchen. Some days, I didn’t even get dressed. To get through the round-the-clock shifts (and occasionally get out of my sweats), I recruited other stay-at-home moms like me. We baked each figure in my oven, and—I’m not going to lie—it wasn’t easy. I remember constantly having to run home to switch out another batch. Imagine the looks I’d get at the supermarket checkout when I’d mumble, “Please hurry, I have heads in the oven!”
Two years ago, when I couldn’t keep up with orders (and neither could my oven), I expanded the business by hiring a manufacturing company to mass-produce the clay figures.
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