By JENNIFER GISH, Staff writer
First published: Wednesday, September 12, 2007
from TimesUnion.com
Moms find success with potatoes, paint, T-shirts and kid-friendly designs
Kids squeal in the backyard with their baby sitter, running inside on occasion to grab snacks or a princess costume, necessary for any decent imaginary tightrope walker in a pretend circus.
Inside, their mothers conduct business. Amy Lucey and Heidi Nathanielsz lean over Karen Shaw's kitchen table watching her press a sliced baking potato coated with orange paint against a child's white T-shirt. It's a Monarch butterfly design, one of the newest in their line of simple but bold children's clothing, which seems to pluck its patterns right out of children's imaginations and plant them on crisp white T-shirts and onesies.
Their small, home-based business, Sweet Potato Prints, started two years ago after Lucey, a mother of two young children who lives in the same Delmar neighborhood as Shaw, read about potato printing in one of Martha Stewart's magazines. Lucey made shirts for her own kids, and Shaw thought they were so cute she wanted to learn how to make them.
An evening craft party between moms eventually turned into a small business enterprise. Today, racks of tiny T-shirts and onesies hang in Shaw's basement ready to be shipped out to Internet customers or sold at the Troy Waterfront Farmers Market on Saturday mornings.
Later this month, the stay-at-home moms, who are all in their 30s, will appear on the "Martha Stewart Show" to talk about their products, which allow them to tap into their knowledge as moms and, at the same time, get a break from the day-to-day chores of motherhood.
An ego boost
The three mothers work on the patterns -- a long green alligator with jaws open wide, a boxy red firetruck, a bright pink flower with egg-shaped petals -- when their kids are at last nestled into bed or off playing with friends. Their husbands watch the kids, so the moms can work their booth at the farmers market, where other stay-at-home moms talk to them about how they wish they could start their own businesses, too.
"When you're getting reaction from people you don't know, for people who like your stuff, it's a validation, an ego boost that you don't get in your everyday life," says Shaw, who as a mom makes lunches and ties shoelaces without many thank-yous. "We don't have traditional jobs where your bosses give you raises for doing a good job."
Shaw, who worked at an environmental consulting firm before her two children were born, constantly checks on Internet orders or retools the company Web site from the computer in her kitchen.
Lucey, who has an art degree, designs all the packaging for the shirts, which are individually gift-wrapped in bright tissue paper and tied off with ribbon.
And Nathanielsz, an Albany mother of two with a master's degree in education from Harvard, sometimes stays up until midnight working on the accounting. Their fourth partner, Emily Edgell, recently moved to St. Louis and will likely take over wholesaling responsibilities.
"They're cute prints, and it's really unique because they are stay-at-home moms who are printing these adorable little items with potatoes," says Carol Overland, owner of Wilkins and Olander, a resort-area boutique in Door County, Wis., which carries the clothing.
Finding a niche
Sweet Potato Prints started with an investment of $1,000 per mother and made its money back in the first year. This year, they started seeing a modest profit. The whole process of setting up a business was much easier than they imagined, and they say it has allowed them to have a creative outlet and find a niche in the traditional work world while maintaining focus on their kids.
It was, after all, their work as mothers that inspired the clothing business.
Tired of seeing children's clothing that looked like miniature versions of adult wear or T-shirts plastered with a company name, the moms wanted designs that looked like they were for children.
"You kind of want to keep them innocent and as uncommercialized as possible," Shaw says.
Because Sweet Potato prints are made from hand-sculpted potato "stamps" the moms make in their kitchens, each shirt is different. The colors are bright, the designs are simple, limited by what can be made with a potato stamp and a small thin brush for basic detailing.
The women use T-shirts and onesies from American Apparel, a company that makes all its products in the United States and offers workers fair wages and benefits, a detail that was important to the moms.
Small promoters
Sweet Potato Prints, which are made with regular potatoes because sweet potatoes bleed their color and they tend to make grainy prints, offers more than 20 patterns (half of them are on the Internet), adding new designs twice a year.
The women's children are enthusiastic promoters of their products, begging to wear the bluebird shirt multiple days in a row or requesting the turtle pattern, called "Go Slowly," when they're getting dressed in the morning.
The moms say it's because children make a connection with the images, which look like something they might be able to create themselves.
Sometimes, Shaw looks at the crayon drawings done by her oldest child, 5-year-old Amelia, and notices how the birds and the flowers are beginning to look a lot like the ones on Sweet Potato Prints' clothing.
It won't be long until Amelia's drawings, and the drawings of the other business partners' children, inspire new prints.
With their crayon box color schemes and pretend circuses in the backyard, they already inspired the business.
Jennifer Gish can be reached at 454-5089 or by e-mail at jgish@timesunion.com.
The owners of Sweet Potato Prints will appear on "The Martha Stewart Show" at 9 a.m. Sept. 27 on WXXA Ch. 23).
