Seed for Success | Empowering Women Entreprenuers

Wow!

This Yahoo! voting process has really energized our base. Dapple users, retailers and friends have all been voting and writing us excited emails. Significantly more new subscribers have signed up to our mailing list in the last couple of weeks and we are betting that there will be an increased number of sales.

We don’t know Joe the Plumber but Joe our accountant has been rooting for us. Thanks Joe!

This race is so much fun largely because our opponents are so awesome. The tallies keep changing at breakneck-speed — it is often truly nerve wracking. And talk about swing votes… Abby and Karla are so impressive that on many days we almost feel like casting a vote for them (only almost though).

But to stay on message here…we are thoroughly enjoying all the outpouring of support. It’s a great culmination to the six months Seeds for Success program. And we hope you keep up with Dapple even after the program is over.

In the meantime, please keep voting.

Every vote counts!

Dana and Tamar

Some time ago, Tamar and I had a great conversation with Dr. Lois Frankel. “Your company has serious legs and you are on the verge of something huge†she said “but you have to make the necessary provisions to allow for your success.†Translation: get the office space you need, expand your staff and, most importantly, pay for capacity: hire somebody experienced and top-notch to help with you growth. “You will soon reap the benefit of your investment and it will pay for itself many times over†she promised.

Bobbi Brown, some two weeks later, had almost the opposite advice for us: her emphasis was on conservative and controlled growth. And she had the success story to back up her advice. She started her company in 1991 with nothing but a great concept and several lipsticks. She managed to keep expenses low by working out of her home office and soliciting family members to help with the business. Remarkably, she had never raised outside financing when she sold the company five years later – all because she grew at her own speed, always taking in more money than she was spending. The rest, of course, is history. Bobbi Brown has built a beauty empire and her name and brand are world-renown. I, myself, am one of her first and best clients.

So what to do when two such bright and well-meaning mentors give you such seemingly differing views?

Tamar and I have been talking these issues over a lot – after all, they cut to the very core of our company and our day-to-day lives. But we have come to the realizations that these approaches are not so different after all. I think what both Bobbi Brown and Dr. Lois Frankel were saying is “Look at yourselves and look at your company. What are your needs at this time, what is your outlook and what is the best way to get to your goal? Do what’s right for you and a company of your size at every step of the way.â€

It’s obviously not a great time for taking risks or making out-sized capital commitments. But the demand for our product is strong enough and the feedback so positive that we both feel we need to move full force ahead. We have out-grown our current space and need to upgrade. We have our hands so full, even with the help of friends and family, that the time has come to expand our team.

Of course, we are doing all this in the most economic way possible: Tamar’s husband is sharing some inexpensive warehousing space with us, instead of hiring headhunters, we are working through friends in retail and with the advice of mentors to locate talent, for PR – we are using my cousin’s agency and getting a “family rate.â€

It’s a time of great uncertainty, but Tamar and I have placed our bets on Dapple.

Check out our new packaging and our extended new line:
http://dapplebabyblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/dapplefamilyaugust2008.pdf
What do you think?

Here’s a picture of our booth at the show. I think this was taken after a long day. We are both exhausted.
http://dapplebabyblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/boothpicture.jpg

Also, as promised, here is some cool new baby stuff we discovered at the show:

If you have little kids, you know this: everything you wear around your neck or arm will eventually end up finding its way into their little mouths. A dentist mom found the perfect solution. Chewable Jewels is the “original teething jewelryâ€. Safe and stylish for moms to wear and kids to chew. www.chewablejewels.com

Tamar loved Bruz Wear. Her son is a “real†boy. This company built knee and tushi pads straight into their pants. Bruz Wear. Crawl. Walk. Shred. Padded pants for little explorers. www.bruzwear.com

Personality for your stroller: www.bonnebonnets.com

The creator of this line had the booth right next to ours. We loved her and her products: http://www.nolinnali.com

We recently returned from the ABC Kids show in Vegas, the primary trade show for the juvenile products industry. We “unveiled” our new look and expanded product line, talked to many retailers both big and small, met a great bunch of entrepreneurs, got a sneak preview of the newest innovations in the baby market, and even managed to shop a bit (on the last day of the show exhibitors often sell the products they exhibit at a discount to other trade show attendants). We will shortly post a picture of our booth and our new line and a list of really cool new products that we found out about at the show.

No matter what you think of Sarah Palin’s politics - you gotta hand it to her – she is a first-rate orator.

Watching her stand there, upright, confident, skillfully engaging the crowd, I was reminded of the public speaking advice Tamar and I got from two of our distinguished mentors, Peggy Klaus and Dr. Lois Frankel.

Peggy had watched our camera interviews and started our conversation with constructive criticism. “Tamar,†she said, “you end many of your sentences with an upward inflection, as if you were asking a question.†(“My name it Tamar?â€; “I have three kids?†etc). “This,†Peggy said, “can make you seem unsure of yourself when you should come across as confident.†Now, Tamar is one of the most confident, outgoing people I know. Still when we reviewed Tamar’s TV interview with Peggy’s comments in mind, we saw exactly what she meant. Tamar has since been working on her intonation – even her husband has noticed the difference.

“You Dana,†Peggy continued “need to stand straight with your head upright to make sure every word of yours projects properly.†She also pointed out the distracting little strand of hair that always seems to finds its way right to the front of my face.

Peggy is the author of Brag! For interviews, but also for regular conversations, Peggy advises to develop “bragging bytes,†little anecdotes or stories explaining what one is doing in an accurate, entertaining and flattering way. For example, if asked what Dapple is all about, we should not simply answer with a sentence that can be found on our website. Rather, we should respond with something like this: “You know how much mess our babies create, and how we can’t always get everything clean without using harsh, synthetic cleaners. Well, at Dapple, we set out to change that,†or “remember how baby bottles and sippy cups always used to look a little dirty and smell a little icky, no matter how often you cleaned them. With Dapple, this is no longer the case.†These bragging bytes, Peggy says, cannot be canned but should be crafted ad hoc, naturally, in the context of the conversation.

Dr. Lois Frankel - an amazing resource for new entrepreneurs (more about that in the next blog) - also gave us some speaking advice. She noticed that I use too many words to get my message across and explained the value of a concise, compelling oratory style. I think I got it now, but let’s wait for the next interview to see.

I will try to hold my head a little straighter, project my voice a bit better, and clip the strand of hair away from my forehead. No, it probably won’t turn me into a Palin-esque public speaker but, hopefully, it will help me become a better spokesperson for Dapple.

Dapple goes international. Real international.

We’ve been really excited to see our Dapple locator grow from 2 stores in our neighborhood to over 20 all over the United States in just a few short months (http://www.dapplebaby.com/dapple-locator.html#).

But several weeks ago we received a retailer request that was definitely out of the ordinary: the request came from a from a small baby store chain in Hong Kong. They liked the idea behind Dapple and wanted to start importing our products. We hadn’t really planned on branching out beyond North America just yet but these stores looked fun — so we seized the opportunity.

We’ll keep you updated on how Hong Kong Sales are going. If you find yourself in the area – check out one these stores and get some Dapple.

Causeway Bay (Tel 2890-4110)
Causeway Bay Commercial Building, 13 Sugar Street, HONG KONG

Mongkok (Tel 2950-4110)
38 Plaza, 38 Shan Tung Street, Mongkok, Kowloon, HONG KONG

Metro Town (Tel 3549-8910)
Shop 75, Level 2, Metro Town Shopping Mall, 8 Keng Leng Road, TKO, NT, HONG KONG

Cathie Black, President of Hearst Magazines, could easily start her own baby business. When we spoke to her several weeks ago, she was bubbling with brilliant ideas about how to best get our name and message out there.

“Make your presence felt and be persistent,†was Cathie’s overarching advice. This holds true across the board — be it with retailers, media or the end customer.

“If a retailer does not return phone calls,†Cathie said “try showing up at their doorstep – product in hand.†She also encouraged us to start a newsletter - something we are currently working on - to update key people on our progress and to keep Dapple fresh on their minds.

Cathie thought it would be great if we could get high-profile, trend-setting, “alpha moms†to try out and endorse our products. We immediately seized on that advice and worked on getting Dapple into the hands of taste-maker mommies. Our efforts paid off: a couple of weeks ago we were invited by Jayneoni Moore to include Dapple products in an exclusive baby gift basket for moms such as Halle Berry, Jessica Alba, Angelina Jolie and Courtney Cox. In fact, we just received a “Thank You†note from Courtney and Coco telling us how much they liked Dapple. Cool, right?

Per Cathie’s advice we also keep pursuing media channels that are important to us. This month Dapple was featured in the New York Observer, Fit Pregnancy, Big Apple Parent and many, many online publications and blogs.

But Cathie’s most creative ideas were focused on the most important person … the average parent who, like us, is facing a sink full of smelly bottles and a house full of sticky toys. Cathie counseled us to be everywhere that parents with young babies are, to be a resource to them and to get as many of them to try our products as possible. Some of the many specific ideas Cathie had were: give bottle washing presentations in places where parents congregate and on You Tube, distribute product samples in new parents classes, pediatrician offices and nursery schools, host lunches, sponsor free parenting classes, and much more…

When we hung up the phone we felt very very busy but extremely energized.

Thank you Cathie!

BTW: Here’s a link to the NY Observer story. Please note that my kids are much cuter in real life.
(http://www.observer.com/2008/arts-culture/ivory-snow-uber-moms).

If theYahoo! Seeds for Success grant consisted solely of meeting David Vinjamuri – and nothing else – it would already be a rocking program.

My mom is in marketing and writes a marketing column for one of Germanys’ leading business magazines. Vinjamuri is long since a household name – at least in my parents’ household. So I was super-excited when I realized he was the branding expert we would be meeting with as part of the Seeds for Success program.

Vinjamuri is young, casual and totally compelling. Tamar and I walked away from our meeting converted to the Vinjamuri way of approaching a start-up.

Vijamuri’s over-arching message was: “take things slowly.” For his recent book “Accidental Branding,” Vinjamuri followed several entrepreneurs who started small and made it big. He says for most of them: “The first few years were often exceptionally excruciatingly slow.” This was a very comforting notion for Tamar and me. Since we started Dapple, we have always felt outside pressure to rush. Rush to he market before a competitor gets there first. Rush to finish a product before a big expo. Rush to get word out to as many people as possible. Vinjamuri convinced us that it is okay to slow down sometimes. Be deliberate about growing the brand in the first couple of years, establish a core group of devoted fans and take it from there.

Part of that message was Vinjamuri’s advice to pay attention to every last detail. It took us nearly two years to formulate our first two products and we were oftentimes frustrated with how slowly things were going. Today we are grateful that we never compromised on any parts of our formulas - that we kept on testing and refining until we felt that they were perfect. We are now in the process of changing our packaging and designing custom molds for all out bottles. This is not a cheap undertaking but Vinjamuri’s focus on details reinforced our own commitment to design excellence. In a couple of months we hope to be able to put that prefect formula into the perfect bottle.

Another related Vinjamuri message that really resonated with us is “persistence.” Almost every one of the successful entrepreneurs that Vinjamuri followed experienced lulls and slumps in their early stages and some even considered throwing in the towel. While so many exciting things have happened to us in the last couple of months - we are now available in boutiques all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, internet sales are going great, we are being approached almost on a daily basis by retailers who want to carry Dapple and we get amazing feedback from customers across the US - there are certainly also days where nothing goes our way. People don’t return calls, buyers are rude, we get turned down. At the end of such a day we are often overcome by self-doubts and at such times it is really helpful to remember Vinjamuri’s words.

After our meeting, I picked up a copy of Vinjamuri’s book. It’s a fun read and the case studies really solidify his messages to us. But now Vinjamuri is in trouble. On page 16 of “Accidental Branding” he writes “do we really need 24 flavors of toothpaste or 14 kind of dishwasher detergent?”

“Yes Mr. Vinjamuri: the world needs at least one more dishwasher detergent.”

I was a little nervous about the thought of changing our website. I loved the look and feel of our site and had become attached to dapplebaby.com as one would to a pair of favorite jeans. It took all of 5 minutes on the phone with Scott Smigler and his team from Exclusive Concepts to dispel that nervousness.

Scott has over a decade of experience in internet marketing. He started when he was only 15! (15? At 15, I was busy doing math homework, listening to U2, initiating and ending crushes, and trying (in vain) to grow dreadlocks). Scott’s combination of youth and experience translates into a hip sort of savyness. When we met him he was brimming with ideas. Scott’s main message to us was “Engage your audience in every way possible.†He encouraged us to create a Facebook group for Dapple, hand out samples to as many parents as possible and reach out to parent bloggers and online communities.

He took the same approach when it came to our website. While is must certainly serve an informational purpose – getting people acquainted with our product line and brand – the website should ideally do more than that. It should draw the audience into a dialogue with us, the founders of the company, as well as with our brand.

We think the new site does just that. The Exclusive Concepts team kept the sprit and original feel of our design but added so many interactive dimensions. A visitor now has a chance to connect with Dapple in a myriad of different ways — to learn about the background story, give her opinion and suggestions, read updates, join our group or mailing list, watch Dapple videos, and buy products online. And because the new website was built totally within Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, it is easy for us at Dapple to manage orders, maintain, and tailor the site based on feedback we receive.

We created Dapple with babies and families in mind. After having visited our site, we want people to think of us as friends. We think the new website achieves that goal.

Do you agree? www.dapplebaby.com.

PS: Special thanks to Jared Lanyon and Herb Osher who spent countless hours on the phone with us making sure everything was just so.

Tamar and I met with Carolyn Kepcher in New York last week. A real force exuding confidence, competence, and charm, Carolyn graciously agreed to give us her insights into building a strong and successful business operation. She invited us to ask her questions about Dapple.

We first spoke about how to expand Dapple’s retail presence. Dapple is currently available in local New York stores and nation-wide online at diapers.com. We will soon build out our own e-commerce site where we will sell Dapple in cases of twelve. Next, we want to make Dapple available in larger national retail chains, and we asked Carolyn how to best go about it. She advised us to look for strategic outlets and partners and mentioned QVC and the Home Shopping Network as great places to start. “You can capture millions of viewers who are interested in learning about innovative products like yours,†she said. Teaming up with one of these channels would indeed be a great way to make our brand available to parents around America. Since our meeting, we have already started exploring ways to approach these channels.

“Instead of devoting too many resources on expensive ads, take advantage of all the Internet has to offer,†advised Carolyn further. Parents, like us, do indeed increasingly look online to find answers to their questions, connect to other parents, and keep apprised about offerings in the baby market. Once people find out and learn more about Dapple — we know they will love it. So we are determined to make Dapple a real presence online. Retail chain success is hopefully bound to follow…

While we were happy to note that Carolyn shares our conviction in Dapple, and were really taken with her business acumen, what stuck out most to us was Carolyn’s role as a mother. She shared stories about her children and told us how glad she was to have more time to spend with them. While there may never be clear-cut answers to the career/life balance conundrum, it is heartening to tap into a network of successful women who deal with the same questions.

Speaking of questions… if you have any questions for us or would like to give us advice on Dapple, please do so on this blog. We’d love to hear from you.

Dana