Q: How did you meet company co-founder Amy Wright and embark on this business venture?
A: I met Amy in graduate school at the University of Colorado.
We graduated in 1998 and stayed friends. I was an administrator in a law firm and she was doing product development. We went out to dinner several years later and I was carrying my diaper bag which basically functioned like a gigantic dump. I went to get something out of it and the contents of the entire bag went all over the restaurant floor.
I thought: There’s two kinds of diaper bags, one that doesn’t function or one that functions but doesn’t work for fashion. Amy worked in manufacturing and did different kinds of product development, so she knew how to do the manufacturing part of it. I thought we could make it work, make it really nice so it would speak to women similar to us in their 30s that were having babies and didn’t want to go to the vinyl-looking plastic bags that had alphabets on them.
Startup costs were about $100,000, and believe it or not, we both continued to work our jobs to fund it ourselves. We knew it was going to take money, high-quality fabrics and branding strategies. We also knew it was going to be big and that we were going to change part of the industry.
Q: What are the challenges and triumphs of starting your own business while balancing the responsibilities of being a full-time mom?
A: My joke, whenever I (talk to) people who want to be entrepreneurs, is that the difference of your day job is that you get to pick the 12 hours when you want to work it.
Q: What’s it like developing and launching a business from scratch with another person?
A: She is like my sister, we laugh, we love each other like sisters, and we fight like sisters.
We have a “divide and conquer” philosophy, where we both do what we do best, but we communicate with each other too. If you’re going to have a partner, make sure you realize that this is going to be the next closest person to you besides your spouse. Make sure you know this is a big-time commitment, and that you have a lot of passion for it.
There’s a lot of people that look at you and say, “You can’t do this,” but you have to believe in yourself and surround yourself with people that believe in you. Honestly, every day we are like, “What are we going to do to grow it bigger?” We want to go to laptop bags, women’s purses, kids’ backpacks; we have an entire list as long as our arm. We want it to be a worldwide recognized brand.
Edited for length and clarity by Sara Castellanos.
