Amber Price, age 27, is the owner of a website My Sweet Dreams Baby.com that features unique as well as practical items that every mother can use. She has a wide range of products for babies, toddlers, children, and even moms. Her most popular products include a shopping cart cover and superhero cape. I interviewed Amber to find out a little bit more about her and how she started her on-line business.
About Amber
What is your family like?
I am married to Josh. We have been married for almost 5 years. We live in Madison, WI where he is a graduate student at the University getting his PhD in Chemistry. We have two boys – Nathan and Jack. Nathan will be 3 in June and Jack will be 1 in June. I am a stay at home/work at home mom to them. I came from a large family, me plus 4 younger brothers, and plan to have several more kids as well. I love being a mom!
Amber and her son Nathan
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Provo, UT (actually in the same hospital that I had my first son) but we moved to Denver when I was just a few months old and I spent the rest of my life there until I left to go to college at age 18. At that point I headed back to Provo to attend Brigham Young University.
Who do you admire and why?
I admire quite a few of my friends and family members-the things I admire in people are kindness and compassion and hard work. My ultimate hero is of course Jesus Christ. I strive everyday to become a little more like him. I want to be the kind of caring, compassionate, always serving person that he was.
What are your hobbies?
Well, sewing is of course one hobby and the way that I got my business started (more about that below) although I have to say after two years of lots of sewing I am a little burned out on it! I also love to read and attend a book club with a bunch of friends. I love anything social with my friends – playgroups with moms, book club, girl’s night out, etc. I also love to play board games and go out to dinner.
About Her Company
How did you decide to open an on-line baby store?
My husband is a graduate student and is only given a stipend to live on. We already had one child when he started his program and knew we wanted more but also knew that we really wanted me in the home with our children each day but knew money would be tight. I decided I would try to start some sort of business to bring in just a couple hundred dollars a month mostly for fun money – for birthday presents, dates, things like that.
I started out sewing quite a few different baby related items and was surprised to see how well they took off. Almost immediately I was making that “couple hundred dollars” I had hoped to make each month. By about the 8th month of business things really started to take off.
Within about a year I felt like I really had the hang of running a website and decided to start trying to retail things on it as well since business was so good. I began adding other people’s products to my website-things where I would sell the item, they would make and ship it and I would make part of the profit.
I loved the ease of this compared to sewing everything myself and with my second baby just a few months off I knew I needed to cut back on sewing so I started working harder to promote the retail side of things. I now try to focus on finding great and unique products and promoting them well.
Where did the name for your website come from?
My original product idea was a blanket/quilt like I had made for my first son. Everyone loved it and told me I could sell them, so I decided to try. I called the blankets “Sweetdreams Blankets” and wanted a website name with Sweetdreams in the title but not something that just focused on blankets but on babies in general.
Where do you get your products?
Other than the ones I make, I look for unique baby products (and things for moms and kids) that I think I would like if I was the buyer. I am obsessed with baby things-I can’t walk through a store without going to the baby area to look and touch-so it is fun for me to sell great baby products. I get so excited about new products when I add them because I love so many of the things that I sell. I even use a lot of the things I don’t make but that I do sell: the mother’s bracelets, the diapees and wipees, etc.
Where do you want your company to be in 5 years?
Originally when I started this business I would have guessed that 5 years from now I wouldn’t be doing it still because by then my husband will have graduated and will have a good job and we probably won’t need the money, but I love doing it so much that I am guessing I will go on for many more years.
I would like to continue doing the retail end of things. I don’t think I will be doing any of the sewing myself by then because it gets so tricky with kids. Mostly it will just be for fun by that point and maybe to put money into savings for my kid’s college, to help other with and things like that.
What have you learned from running an on-line business?
Oh man, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that. There are so many things. I guess the main thing is that if I have an idea and really want to make it succeed, it can. You just have to work at it and things will happen. Basically the whole if there is a will there is a way thing. I have also learned a lot about good business procedures, balance, things like that.
What advice would you give to mommy entrepreneurs?
I would tell them that you can succeed but you have to put the work in and don’t expect it to just happen. For me, when I wanted the retail end of things to succeed I really had to learn to build a good site, optimize it well for search engines, etc. You can’t just decide to start a business and expect people to flock to you. You have to do what it takes to get your business where you want it to be. And it will mean work, work, work so it should be something you really enjoy doing. After a while you will be able to sit back and see that work really pay off.
One more thing I should maybe mention is that I have enjoyed My Sweetdreams Baby so much that I decided to start a second completely retail website. It was just started in March – Kid’s Furniture Closet.