How stay-at-home moms become millionaires

How stay-at-home moms become millionaires

 With Mother's Day just around the corner, this week seemed like a great time to give a tip of our caps to stay-at-home moms, including these four who used clever ideas to become business moguls.

Gerber: Of course only a mother could found such a successful baby food company! In the late 1920s, Michigan mom Dorothy S. Gerber was hand-straining food for her baby daughter, Sally, when she realized there must be some way to avoid the messy task.

She pointed out to her husband, Daniel, that if his family's business, the Fremont Canning Company, could puree a tomato all day long, its equipment could probably make short work of other fruits and veggies, too.

Daniel Gerber realized his wife was on to something, and after a year of experimentation -- and an extensive search to find the right drawing for their label's now-iconic "Gerber baby" - the Gerbers introduced their first line of baby foods, a super-yummy menu of strained peas, carrots, prunes, and spinach.

Baby Einstein: When Alpharetta, Georgia mom Julie Aigner-Clark went looking for educational materials for her newborn daughter in 1996, she found a disappointing hole in the baby market: there weren't really any educational materials to expose babies to music and the arts.
Some parents would just accept whatever the market was offering. Not Aigner-Clark. She shot a video for her daughter in her basement then edited it with her husband, Bill, on the family computer. She even doodled a logo for the video at her kitchen table.
Within a year, the first Baby Einstein video was in stores, and the series quickly became a runaway hit. Disney bought the company in 2001 after Baby Einstein raked in $12 million in revenue the previous year.
After the sale Aigner-Clark gave an interview to The New York Times in which she sounded a little surprised by her huge windfall.
"I was just a stay-at-home mom who wanted to expose my daughter to classical music, poetry, not a budding entrepreneur."

Mrs. Fields: Debbi Fields was a young stay-at-home mom when she started to feel restless in 1977. She had always loved baking cookies, so she figured she might try her hand at opening a cookie store.
The concept doesn't sound odd now that there's seemingly a Mrs. Fields outlet in every mall you walk into, but at the time the notion that a store would only sell cookies seemed absurd.
Furthermore, Fields was only 20 years old and didn't have any business experience.
Fields nevertheless managed to secure financing for her venture and she opened up her first cookie shop in Palo Alto, California. Fields and her husband, Randall, soon confirmed their suspicions that people really enjoy cookies and will gladly drop a few bucks to get a warm one.
The company began a sweeping franchising program, and in the 1993 Fields sold her cookie empire to an investment firm.

BabyLegs: Put this one on the list of brilliant niche markets we didn't know existed: baby legwarmers. Nicole Donnelly managed to turn that very idea into a fabulously successful company.
In April 2005 Donnelly found a new weapon in her ongoing battle with her daughter's diaper rashes. By letting her daughter enjoy some of what they called "nakedy butt time," the rash got some much-needed fresh air, but the tot's legs got cold.
Donnelly combatted this chilliness by cutting up a pair of socks to make improvised baby legwarmers.
Donnelly quickly realized that the legwarmers had all sorts of side benefits. They did more than just keep her daughter's legs toasty; they also protected the baby's legs when she crawled and made changing diapers a breeze.
Donnelly whipped up some stylish designs and began selling BabyLegs to other moms.
BabyLegs proved to be an incredibly lucrative idea. In 2008 the company moved over $4 million worth of its legwarmers worldwide, and in April 2009 United Legwear bought a majority stake in the company and began aggressively expanding the company's reach.

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Betty Anne Waters

Waters—subject of the current film, Conviction, was a waitress with a high-school-equivalency degree when she decided to switch gears to help her brother, who was in jail for a murder he didn’t commit. The mother of two went to college, got her law degree and worked with Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project to successfully overturn her brother’s conviction. Waters returned to Aiden’s pub, where she was once a waitress, and is now general manager, having chosen to forego the fancy law-firm salary. She volunteers on criminal issues with the Innocence Project.

Paula Deen

Deen suffered from agoraphobia, which made it hard for her to leave the house. The upside, however, was that the constant at-home-alone time helped her perfect her cooking skills. After her marriage ended, she started a catering service, and later her own restaurant, The Lady & Sons. That lead to her own show on the Food Network. Aside from her TV fame, Deen also has her own line of successful cookbooks, cookware, and kitchen accessories.

Mary Kay Ash

After having three children and getting a divorce, Ash started working for Stanley Home Products, a direct-sales firm in Houston. When she was passed over for a promotion in favor of a man she had trained, she retired in protest with the intention of writing about women in business. Her book became a business blueprint for a company she started with her second husband. May Kay Cosmetics is now an international corporation worth millions, and a major outlet for women looking to succeed. Ash died in 2001.

 

Irene Rosenfield

Despite the struggle of being both a mother and an executive, Rosenfield never lost focus. She managed to rise up the corporate ladder even after her husband died after an illness and left her with two children. In 2006, she was named the CEO of Kraft Foods

Bette Graham

She wanted to become an artist, but ended up a secretary instead. Fortunately, her inaccurate typing skills and knowledge of painting (she knew that artists fixed mistakes with a material called gesso) resulted in her developing a quick-drying paint to cover up her typos. Her young son would help her concoct the formula for a kind of “white-out” in her kitchen, and her ingenuity helped her take off from there. Her efforts turned into the Liquid Paper Co., which she sold for more than $47 million in 1980, months before her death.

Linda McMahon

The Republican nominee for Senate from Connecticut married at age 17 and bore a son while finishing college. After another child and a few tough years, she and her husband, Vince, filed for bankruptcy and briefly subsisted on food stamps. Their fortunes changed after they founded Titan Sports and bought the Cape Cod Coliseum, a sports arena that included wrestling matches. A few years later, Vince bought Capitol Wrestling, also called the World Wide Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment). The couple then transformed wrestling into a highly profitable industry, growing their business from a 13-person company to a global conglomerate with more than 500 employees.

Patty Murray

The senator from Washington state ran for election as a “mom in tennis shoes.” That pretty much encapsulates the start of Murray’s career. The mother of two only became politically active after a politician told her she couldn’t. That spurred her to lead a grassroots campaign against preschool-budget cuts, organizing 13,000 parents in the process. That led to an elected position on the school board, a state senator job, and, in 1992, her defeat of a 10-year incumbent to become Washington’s first female senator. 

Erin Brokovich

Before she was the titular character in an award-winning movie, Brokovich was a struggling single mother trying to pay the bills. After she won a small settlment in a personal-injury suit, she went to work as a file clerk for the law firm that represnted her. Soon after, she stumbled on the medical records that would be the basis of her firm’s case against Pacific Gas and Electric. After hosting several TV shows, she now runs Brockovich Research and Consulting, which works with major law firms to help research cases.

J.K. Rowling

Known for the riveting characters and fantasy world of the Harry Potter series, this British author is also famous for her rags-to-riches story. In just five years she went from living on welfare with her baby daughter to becoming a multimillionaire due to the success of her books and the hugely popular movie series based upon them. In March 2010, Forbes estimated her worth at $1 billion.

Susan Powter

Fitness guru Susan Powter was once just an overweight single mom. She lost 130 pounds and became a motivational speaker and fitness expert; in the 1990s her plea to “stop the insanity” was recognized throughout the U.S., and her books and videos were top sellers. She continues to dispense fitness advice and run her company at susanpowteronline.com.