Seed for Success | Empowering Women Entreprenuers

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

http://www.ny1.com:80/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=21&aid=81336

Hi:

It’s Tamar — Dana’s business partner and co-founder of Dapple.

Starting a business can be tough. There are unanticipated obstacles around every corner and all too often many closed doors.

But then there are also plenty unexpected moments of delight. And those moments overshadow and outshine everything else.

One such moment came a couple of days ago when we received an email from Lynette Damir Founder and CEO of Swaddle Designs (http://www.swaddledesigns.com). Making and selling stylish and amazing blankets (Dana and I are huge fans), Lynette has turned her idea into a multimillion dollar business in just a couple of years.

Lynette had read about Dapple on the Seeds for Success site and she liked our idea. So, in addition to posting an encouraging comment on our blog, she sent us an email full of tips on how to build a successful business in the baby world.

Carolyn Kepcher makes the case for a mentor in her blog and concludes by saying “And then someday, become a mentor yourself, and pay it forward.”

Entrepreneurs like Lynette, have made the experience of starting a business so much more rewarding for us and Dana and I hope that one day we will be able to advise a fledgling business and pay it forward .

Tamar

First off, thanks for the wonderful comments.
Dawn you are absolutely right. Our website is www.dapplebaby.com.
Everyone: please visit and sign up for our mailing list.
Max Singford: Congratulations on your triplets! You must be even busier than we are now. Send us your address to info@dapplebaby.com and we will send you some Dapple for your many bottles.

Now here’s what we’ve been up to:

This week had been a real whirlwind for us.

We officially launched Dapple in several baby stores in Manhattan. Check out our dapple locator http://www.dapplebaby.com/index.php?locator
We are hitting the other boroughs in the next days and will be updating the locator daily. So please stay tuned.

Thanks to the great PR team working with Yahoo!, we had an interview with Reuters yesterday and will be filmed for a segment on NY1 next week. We were also approached with some exciting national press opportunities and will let you know what happens.

Yahoo! has paired us up with an incredible web agency. We started working with Scott Smigler and his team from Exclusive Concepts on building a comprehensive and completely original web strategy for Dapple. Scott has amazing energy and we can’t wait to see where he takes Dapple online.

On the new product development front, we are choosing packaging for our toy-cleaner spray and wipes. We will post the different options that we have narrowed down on this site shortly so you all can let us know which you prefer. We’d love your input.

Back to work,
Dana