Meeting Carolyn
May 18th, 2008
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
May 18th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Hi, Dana and Tamar. That is terrific that you had the opportunity to meet Carolyn. Sounds like a very productive meeting. Good for you.
Since Head2Toe Publications is developing products that children ages 0-13 years will use, I am looking for a toy cleaner for the products we will be selling. When I read that you will be developing one, I thought how great it would be to offer it to my customers. Since we are not going to be selling in stores, I can help promote your products to different markets that purchase through catalogs mainly. Even though we are sort-of competing for the next 5 months, I feel that we should support one another because we are business women working together.
Feel free to contact me and we can discuss how we can help one another. You have a terrific product that I would love to promote.
Talk to you soon.
Karla, President
Head2Toe Publications
May 19th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Karla:
We’d love to clean your toys!
We’ll be in touch later this week.
Thanks for the great idea.
Dana
May 20th, 2008 at 6:46 am
I don’t see a link to your website. I’d like to send it to my daughter (and grandbaby). can you please send to me e-mail address. Thanks
May 29th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
That is very great. Do you make detergents for cleaning carpets, floor etc? if yes how can i get. Since my firm is a cleaning company what can you advise me to use? Im from Kenya
June 4th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Dana,
Very cool! So glad to see all of the great buzz around Dapple. I really like how you guys are getting the word out virally; that’s kind of the same thing I’m doing at Jurlique, and from everything I’ve read about Dapple, I can see that you guys are bound to explode (in a very positive way). Best of luck!
-Jeremy
June 8th, 2008 at 10:42 am
We need to know the link of your website.