Barefoot Dreams--a lesson in accidents
As I've written about here before, our family business is running an ecommerce store called sleepytimestore.com. We started off selling baby blankets, mostly Little Giraffe and Coyuchi organic ones, but then we added a line of blankets called Barefoot Dreams--and that's when the entire trajectory of the business changed.
When we added their blankets, we also listed a few of their other items for sale--why not? But pretty soon, these Barefoot Dreams robes, throws and "grown-up" blankets started to outsell the baby blankets, not to mention just about everything else on the website.
To understand why, we took some of these things home and Cundy started using the throw and wearing the robe. And then we got it. The stuff is incredible.
Anyway, I don't mean to write a big tribute to Barefoot Dreams right now; I'm just trying to talk about the power of paying attention when accidents happen--and of experimenting. Heck, we were running a baby site; we had no real business selling premium robes. Well, what we discovered, which is no surprise after all, is that the moms who buy our blankets also love these robes and the big blankets.
So now that we're opening a "real" store in our little hometown of Decatur, GA, what are selling? Baby stuff and women's clothes.
The big lesson here is one I try hard to remember in my own child-centric home: never never never forget the mama.