It Ain't Over (30 page)

Now all she had to do was get her product into stores. “Working in the Target program I learned a lot about how stores think. From the beginning, my ultimate goal was to get the product into Babies R Us, and Target taught me to time my pitch to exactly when they were looking at new products. I was also able to show Babies R Us that I’d already learned the ropes of dealing with a large retailer.”

Now the SippiGrip is available not only through Babies R Us but also at Walmart, Amazon, and boutiques from Los Angeles to New York.

But Sari says it’s one thing to get onto store shelves, quite another to stay there. “There’s always competition, from both upstarts and giant companies.” What she has learned is that the best defense is a good offense: The smartest way to protect a spot on the shelf is to enlarge that spot by adding products. In recent years, SippiGrip has been joined by BooginHead’s PaciGrip (a pacifier attachment), PaciPouch (a small bag that can be attached to a stroller to hold pacifiers), SplatMat (easy-to-clean mats for under high chairs), and Squeez’Ems (reusable food pouches for puréed food)—all Sari’s inventions.

“We’re always trying to be innovative and give parents what they need,” Sari says. “For example, after reading reviews online about the PaciGrip, I realized it needed to work with all types of pacifiers. So I changed the design—and it’s now my bestselling product.”

It’s also the product that taught Sari a couple of important lessons.

Number one: Don’t scrimp on legal counsel. “The original name of the PaciGrip was BinkiGrip,” she explains. “To save money, I just checked to see if that name was in use, which it wasn’t. But had I hired an attorney to do a full trademark search, I would have learned that Playtex already had a trademark on the word ‘Binky.’ ”

The second lesson? “Don’t give up.” Sari already had thousands of BinkiGrips on shelves and 20,000 more ready to be distributed. “We were facing an enormously expensive withdrawal, then a redesign, a repackaging, and a relaunch. So much wasted money! I wanted to give up.” But Sari didn’t, and Playtex gave BooginHead a reasonable amount of time to sell the BinkiGrips already on the shelves before replacing them with PaciGrips.

In 2010, BooginHead passed $1 million in sales, so Sari decided to cut her remaining ties to Microsoft and devote herself to BooginHead full-time. The company now has nine employees, and Sari’s sales are up to $3 million.

The best part, though, is that Sari is now what she always wanted to be: an entrepreneur and her own boss.

“Taking a chance on BooginHead led me toward a more fulfilling life,” she says, “the kind of life I want to show my children it’s possible to lead. With some structure, a good support system, and the right entrepreneurial spirit, any dream is possible.”

Julie Azuma, 62

New York, New York

W
hat Julie Azuma remembers most from her baby’s first year is a sense of bewilderment and despair. A successful designer in the apparel industry, Julie was past 40 when she and her husband adopted an infant from Korea. And things weren’t going well. Baby Miranda would scream and scream, and she couldn’t be soothed. She wasn’t reaching her developmental milestones on time either—didn’t sit up on her own, didn’t walk well, didn’t talk at all.

“I was extremely patient and just waited for these issues to go away,” says Julie, now 62. “We couldn’t figure out what was wrong. And it hurt when a lot of people in my family felt that Miranda’s delays were due to my lack of parenting skills.”

When it became clear that the issues were ongoing, Julie took Miranda to a series of pediatricians, neurologists, psychiatrists, and speech-and-language pathologists, all in search of answers that didn’t come. “They said she had speech and developmental delays; they said it was because of the adoption;
they said a lot of different things,” Julie says with a sigh. “They never said she had autism.”

Miranda didn’t demonstrate autism’s defining symptom, which is failure to make eye contact. By the time she was six years old and still not talking, however, it was clear to everyone that something was very wrong. Julie and her husband had adopted a second child, Sophie, who was developing just fine. But even at a special-education preschool, Miranda was not progressing.

“Miranda was six and a half before she was diagnosed, and by that time, sadly, it was tough to change her trajectory,” says Julie. Today we know that early, intense therapy can make a tremendous difference in how an autistic child develops, but for Miranda the opportunity seemed lost.

“Twenty years ago, autism was a death knell,” Julie says. “Autistic children were thought of as kids without language and academic skills. They were often institutionalized.”

Not about to give up on her daughter, Julie started her research, which was a lot harder in the days before Google. “But I found a book called
Let Me Hear Your Voice,
which led me to a parent movement that advocated using Applied Behavior Analysis.” Now a standard therapy, ABA was then a largely unknown method for teaching language and social skills to children with autism. “This ABA method was the one thing that gave us parents hope.”

Armed with that hope, Julie now had to put ABA theory into practice for Miranda. That meant finding the very specific developmental products that were crucial to the therapy’s success—like wooden blocks, but without letters or numbers (which can be frustrating for children who don’t recognize them). And flash cards that showed emotions, actions, household items, and food, but used actual photographs (not illustrations, which may be difficult for children with autism to interpret).

“These products were so hard to find!” exclaims Julie. “I would spend
weeks tracking down what I needed. I was a desperate woman; I went from place to place to place.” At one point she even asked a friend who was traveling to London to call a British company while she was there, to get her a product that wasn’t available in the United States.

Amazingly, though, the new therapy worked. “Within six weeks of starting ABA, Miranda spoke. She was able to say, ‘I want orange juice.’ It was a revelation,” says Julie, who by that time had left her fashion-industry job to stay home with Miranda and Sophie. As tough as the product search had been for Julie, she realized it would be impossible for a working mom. So she began to think about starting her own company to help other families.

Almost 30 years in the apparel industry had taught Julie how to buy and sell, how to merchandise, and how to make a profit, but they hadn’t prepared her to become an entrepreneur. Eager to learn, she took a once-a-week night course on starting a business.

“I knew I couldn’t afford a real store,” says Julie. “I didn’t have a lot of start-up money. Then a woman in my class said, ‘Why don’t you go on the Internet?’ It seemed like a great deal: You could have a store for five or six hundred dollars a year, as opposed to paying New York City rents.”

Though it made financial sense, this was 1994, when most people didn’t even have an email address and e-commerce barely existed. To make things worse, Julie says, she was at the time “completely computer illiterate.” Determined to create her store, she found someone to design a website and she set to work learning how to use a computer—even though she didn’t have a lot of confidence in herself.

“I was scared to do it on my own,” she recalls. “I tried to find partners for the business, and they all turned me down. They told me they didn’t think it was a good business model. But I was really thinking of this as support for other parents. I couldn’t give up.”

In 1995, Julie launched Different Roads to Learning, an online store at
DiffLearn.com
. (“There was a limit then on how long your URL could be.”) The site initially offered about 30 products, but the problem was getting parents to find it. Word of mouth in this close-knit community, along with a simple black-and-white paper catalog, created traction.

“Parents would tell other parents,” Julie recalls, “or take the catalog to their schools. We all had a lot of sympathy for each other. It was cathartic to make these meaningful, intimate connections, especially back then, when parents of autistic kids were isolated and just working with their own home programs.”

Julie was careful to keep her costs low, and she never needed a bank loan. She estimates that her start-up cost was $40,000 total.

Different Roads to Learning grew slowly. “I was still taking all the packages to the post office myself when I got orders—that’s how small we were. But then one day my accountant said, ‘Congratulations! You’re profitable!’ I said, ‘That’s impossible. I thought we were still in the hole.’ That’s when I realized,
Wow, this could actually be a good business.
”

Julie doesn’t carry orders to the post office anymore. Today, Different Roads to Learning has four full-time employees, carries more than 600 products, and earns $2.5 million in annual sales. The company has also added a book division and four apps—something Julie could never have imagined back in 1995.

“We’re still a smallish company,” says Julie. “But we’ve come so far, and so have the kids. Because of early intervention and enough ABA work, they’re so much more skilled now. A lot of these kids can be mainstreamed by the time they’re five, in kindergarten. That just wasn’t happening before. And because we sell to a lot of schools, I like to think that we’ve been a part of bringing about that change. Sometimes I look back and I’m amazed.”

Miranda is still developing language at 25, and lives in a small group home that provides care, support, and vocational training. It’s not the way
Julie hoped things would turn out, but she’s glad her older daughter is happy and healthy. Her younger child, Sophie, recently graduated from NYU with a degree in psychology, which Julie thinks was inspired by her sister’s struggles.

Julie becomes reflective when she talks about her own struggles and the emotional obstacles she had to overcome in order to start her business.

“I’m Japanese American; my entire family went to an internment camp during World War II,” she says. “I grew up always having a little bit of fear of being not quite American enough. And a lot of my life was spent feeling like I needed to be apologetic, to not stand out. I’ve always been very timid. I wish I’d had the courage to do this earlier. I wish I’d had the courage to have confidence in myself at an earlier age, and the courage to take a risk.”

As for those partners who turned her down when she was afraid to launch a business alone? Julie has a new perspective on that, too.

“At the time I was so disappointed, but now I’m happy because they would have driven me crazy. I know today that my success is about me, not anyone else. Whenever anybody asks me if they should start a business, I tell them if you have the passion, you’ve got to go for it. I believe in letting go and not being afraid.”

Veronica Bosgraaf, 43

Holland, Michigan

V
eronica Bosgraaf had a big idea. And it was hatched on a typical night around the dinner table after an atypical question from her six-year-old daughter, Anna: “What are we eating?”

It was lemon chicken. Stay-at-home mom Veronica had made it many times before for her husband and three kids, and always without a question. But on this night, Anna was giving her plate the evil eye.

“Chicken?” she said. “What do you mean,
chicken
?”

That morning, Veronica had chaperoned Anna’s first-grade class on a field trip to a farm near their hometown of Holland, Michigan, where she watched her daughter play with baby chicks and hold a beautiful orange hen in her arms. “I could see what was happening in her little brain,” Veronica says. “She was putting it all together, what was on her plate with the experience she’d had at the farm.”

Trained as a scientist—she was a former high school biology teacher—
Veronica had never been a “Santa Claus kind of mom” (“I’ve always been completely honest with my kids: I would tell them that Santa is not real and then explain the legends behind him”). So she gently told Anna that people eat animals. Anna persisted: “So when they get old and die,
then
we eat them?” Not exactly. “I told her that people raise animals, then slaughter, sell, and process them and that’s the meat we eat. Anna was horrified.”