We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Julie Hildebrand a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Julie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you take vacations? How do you keep things going – any advice for entrepreneurs who feel like they can’t step away from their business for a short vacation?
One of the main reasons I switched from a full-time teaching position to owning my own business was so that I could have the flexibility to travel with my family. My husband’s job requires he travel for several weeks at a time, so I wanted to be able to go with him and bring along our daughter to experience the world! I’ve made as much of my work as possible digital so that I can work remotely. For the work that must be done in office, like packing and shipping our products, I trained a neighbor on all the ends and outs and she is able to fulfill orders for me while we are traveling.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
As teachers, with a combined 25+ years of experience, we noticed children’s attention spans were diminishing more and more. We saw a need for quality screen-free entertainment for children.
We put our educational expertise together to design busy bags that would provide entertainment AND grow your little’s mind, all while being able to take it on the go! If you can’t be the Pinterest mom, be the busy bébés mom!
Our busy bags allow children to work independently while also enriching their learning through hands-on, screen-free activities. All of our products have been rigorously tested and approved by our own little ones.
We’ve done the hard work for parents – researching and curating themes to delight your child again and again.
We know life gets busy with kiddos in tow, and we hope to make life easier!
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
Amy and I taught 4th grade together for a couple of years at a campus in S. Austin. It was while working together that we realized what a need screen-free entertainment was for kids. I started making busy bags for my own toddler so that we could maintain our life style of traveling and dining out, and Amy pitched the idea of creating these for families!
How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.
We initially launched our site on Wix because neither Amy or I had experience building out a full website. It was easy to build and maintain, but it lacked many of the integrations that Shopify provides, so we knew at some point we would have to make a switch. Shortly after launching, we decided to give Etsy a try in addition to our Wix site. Our sales took off immediately on Etsy because of the advertising and SEO that the platform provides. In addition, we also set up a Facebook/Instagram shop to make it easy for customers on social media to shop. It became very tedious to manage inventory between the many different platforms, so at 3.5 years in, we decided to switch to a Shopify site. We used one of their pre-built templates and a migration software to transfer all of our data from Wix to Shopify. Now, we are so grateful that our sales are synced between all of our platforms through the integrations that Shopify allows.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.busybebes.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/busybebesatx/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/busybebes/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/busybebes