Starting a Small Business While Having a Newborn

A bold title.  I can't bring myself to create a step by step instructional post teaching my audience how to create a successful business with a newborn crawling around all over the place, but I wanted to share some of my experiences with you in hopes that someone out there can relate.  Our lives changed exponentially over the last year or two and I'm sure that is a familiar experience for everybody.  These times have brought about many changes and we are trying our best to adapt to them lovingly.  I'd sure like to hope we are doing a good job, our smiley baby seems to encourage us so.  

It's no joke trying to start a new company.  Ours happens to be an online candle and soap shop based in southeast Michigan called Earth Berry Apothecary.  It is a labor of love which focuses on providing quality soy candles and handmade soaps at an affordable price so anybody can spoil themselves and feel the benefits of self-care.  

We started our company as expecting parents with a deep concern about the bad reputation of scented candles and soaps, so it was very important to us to focus on creating products with the safety of our child in mind.  This has always been a standard philosophy of our company, to carefully craft a luxurious product with no harmful additives but rather a deeply enjoyable aromatic experience created from natural ingredients.  

In short, we use soy wax for our candles and this is a very good thing, trust me.  We also use oils in our soaps that you've actually heard of like olive oil and coconut oil.  This is also a very good thing.  There are things called parabens and phthalates and they are found in Stinkee Candle and Flaf and Floddy Works as well as all of the other leading brands I'm not allowed to mention, but they are really bad for you.  

On the business side of things, something feels very traditional about running your company from your home.  While our house has been drastically modified to accommodate the efficient production of hundreds of soaps and candles, it is still a home with dishes, diapers and a lot of laundry.  As a couple, my wife and I have never assigned roles to our marriage nor to our relationship.  When it's time for someone to watch the baby for an extended amount of time while preparing dinner and washing the clothes, we are a well-functioning team.  It's actually that same team who runs this company and that nature of family-oriented philosophy is very abundant in our household.  

This is very new for us.  In fact, we have only been around for something like a year and we have only been selling soaps for about four months.  It is currently the season of farmers' markets, but we are passing up dozens of opportunities simply because we don't have the time.  Time.. That's the word.  Every time I write it I feel like it's something I can't quite grasp properly, but there is some value in attempting to organize your time more properly.  If there is any lesson from this post it should be just that; if you want to run a small business while having a newborn you must understand how to organize your time.  We do this with the clever use of a dry-erase board, but what you do is between you and you.

I hope you enjoyed this post, I always try to keep it brief.  If you're interested in soy candles, cold process soaps, or small business in general follow us as Earth Berry Apothecary on any platform you can think of.  This is the preface of a very successful journey and I'm sure one day I myself will look back on this and laugh at how simple our lives used to be.  We are blessed in so many ways and believe me you are too!