We were lucky to catch up with Mona Mudd recently and have shared our conversation below.
Mona, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
It all started with a medical bill. Around 2015, my daughter Maggie got her arm caught on a handrail partition at the airport in Providence, Rhode Island. She managed toge ther hand unstuck, but when she went to step toward me she fainted. Something about white blood cells rushing to the location of her now fractured wrist. She quickly came to, but the ambulance was called. Randomly passing out at the airport is apparently frowned upon by the airlines, and one is not allowed to immediately get on an airplane after. As it happened, our luggage was dragged out of the belly of the plane, we were rushed out of the airport–she on a gurney, and tore through the street of Providence on our way tot he emergency room. All was well, wrist wrapped up tidy, we took a flight back to St. Louis later that evening.
Months went by. school started. The bill came in. Even though I had insurance, it was too much. I called my mom and said, “I need to find a way to turn one dollar into two.”
One day, right around that time, the head of the independent school where I worked as a middle school teacher came into my classroom. She loved the homemade lotion I always had in my classroom–a blend that I had been making for my family since around 2008. She said to me, “How much would you charge me for that?”
I said, “I don’t know…five dollars, I guess? I could juse tell you how to make it.”
She said, “I don’t want you to tell me how to make it. I want you to make it for me, slap a label on it, and I want to give it to people as gifts.”
I went home that weekend. No label, no idea what to call this lotion. But I loved the idea that it came out of our house and I wanted to honor that. Every summer, I worked at a summer camp in Brewster, Massachusetts that Maggie and Will attended. While there, we had always rented a cottage on Cape Cod in the summer, thus we had long dubbed our house in Missouri “The Little Winter House”.
That weekend, as the kids and I sat eating lunch at our kitchen table, I asked my son Will, “Do you think I should call this lotion company The Little Winter House?
“No.” He said, “Just ‘The Winter House’.” He happened to be taking a marketing class in college at the time. “People like three words in a name, not four.”
Since that day, we have turned it into a company. Beginning with lotion, we eventually expanded to soap and lip balm. From there to many health and beauty items.
We aren’t millionaires, but that wasn’t the goal anyway. I enjoy all my other roles in life as well, being a teacher and being an author. I don’t want one thing to eclipse the others. With The Winter House, we still consistently turn one dollar into two, and that is all I ever asked for.
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?
The Winter House is the overall brand that encompasses a number of products. We sell lotion, soap, bath salts, infused olive oils, healing balms, natural facial steam, face masques, etc. The list goes on and on! When I began, I only sold products to friends and family. The sales naturally expanded to holiday orders. I started selling at local farmer’s markets and event fairs, then built a website. One of my most popular local events is a bath bomb party. Local area groups or families hire The Winter House for birthday parties, Mommy/Daddy & Me days, baby showers, and even Scouts events–making bath bombs fulfills the requirements of a Home Scientist badge. (who knew?!) At the event, the kids learn how to make bath bombs to take home. It helps that I am a 2nd grade teacher and have the skills to corral a crowd of boys and girls, so these events are a great blend of my skill set in a number of areas.
The final event of our calendar year is always The Winter House Open House in which our customers are invited into our home the first Saturday of December to purchase holiday items. It is a favorite event of the year. It is a chance to bring people together during the holidays and share our gratitude with all of people in our community who have supported our family over the years through their patronage. After that event, we take a break! We close for the holiday and until February 1st in order to make soap and prepare stock for the upcoming year.
Have you ever had to pivot?
My daughter and I used to go on walks around our neighborhood when she was young, and there was a house on the corner that had been converted into a sno-cone shop. We would joke that we knew when business wasn’t booming because discordant things would get added to the menu. What was a sno-cone shop in July would be a snow cone and burger stand in August. Flags were on sale one day. Keychains appeared on the counter. Tacos or potato chips would be added to their signage as an attempt to draw a larger crowd. When we rounded the corner one day to see “Gyros” handwritten on the menu, we almost fell over laughing. I mean, God bless them…but you can’t do everything well–and that’s okay. Shine where you are.
I can remember a time a few years back when my “menu”, so to speak was over-burdened with too many things. I had too many products that required unique packaging, suppliers, and ingredients. I wanted to be able to meet the needs of all of my customer base, but that painted me into a corner. Financially, it didn’t make sense to spend $35 on one unique ingredient that was only in one recipe, in one special order, only to have most of the batch then sit on the shelf awaiting another buyer. Over time, I devolved into having a lot of half-things, but nothing that made a whole that I could sell without needing to buy more.
I had to restart my thinking. At the time, my friend who is the owner and executive director of a New England summer camp, shared with me the most precious business advice she had ever received: “In business, it is not always how much you make, it’s how much you don’t give away.”
I had to pivot to a more streamlined approach to my products, ensuring that each ingredient “earned” it’s right to be there. Olive oil, for instance, is a multipurpose ingredient that is always a worthwhile purchase. But Rose Absolute? That’s $35 for 5mL (about one-sixth of an ounce)–that’s an ingredient that blows the budget. I had to shave much of my product line, making sure that a large percentage of my products could be created using ingredients that overlap. So, my pivot wasn’t an attempt to carve out a larger market space, or get more attention. It was a step backward to regroup and create larger success through a smaller scale.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Whenever young parents or teachers ask me for advice about raising children–either in the home or in the classroom–I tell them, “Look. Here’s the thing. You are going to be uniquely good at about three things in parenting. That’s it. And those three things are going to be the exact three things this little baby soul needs you to be good at. That’s why the Universe put you together. Be those three things. Let everybody else be their three things.” People exhaust themselves trying to be every single thing, every type of parent, every style of teacher. We exhaust our kids as well, and in business we can exhaust our customer that way.
I think it is easy to get caught in the idea that all forward movement is productive. If creatively, you need to bend and be fluid in an artistic sense–then, shine on. But don’t try to change to meet the market. Like I tell my school children: “Be aware of the crowd, yes, but don’t follow the crowd.”
“I think it is a common pitfall to imagine that you have to make yourself or your product incredibly available or changeable in business to succeed. When, in reality it is often far better to stay in your lane, do your three things (or one, or two or four…) and do those incredibly well.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.littlewinterhouse.com
- Instagram: @winter.house
- Facebook: The Winter House