Never Underestimate a Small Idea

I shared with Maya that my best friend and I made greeting cards when we were 9 years old and sold them door to door.  We would hand-draw and color them and come up with cute sayings.  We didn’t make much money but it was a blast to do.  A few years later, my mom enrolled me in Junior Achievement.  This is the club where kids can work together to come up with an idea for a product, build it, come up with a business plan and attempt to advertise and market it.  If I remember correctly, we invented a make-shift Post It Note dispenser combined with other add-on gadgets to make it multi-functional.  Obviously our idea didn’t get very far because I’m sitting here still dreaming up silly ideas.  I always had the ‘bug’ in me to come up with some novel concept that perhaps others hadn’t tapped into yet.  then I’d map out in my mind how I would eventually reach success.

Just today, I promised Maya if she got ready early for Sunday School we could play Barbies for a little bit before she leaves.  We started to dress our dolls and I was annoyed by the fact that there wasn’t a single article of clothing in her bin of outfits that wasn’t snagged or shredded by that stupid Velcro!  I couldn’t even pull the clothes apart without damaging them more.  What a terrible idea I thought.  Velcro??  What were they thinking?  Even our own clothes aren’t fastened with Velcro?  What a waste of so many beautiful outfits.  My mother used to sew like a champ and would make cute little Barbie outfits for my dolls with snaps.  Remember those?  They were an extraordinary use of fasteners that snapped right into place and never shred, ripped or destroyed doll clothes.  I do recall they would come loose occasionally and we would just grab our trusty ol’ needle and thread to re-fasten them.  Viola!

Later Maya and I went to Panera’s for lunch and I suddenly blurted out, “That’s it!  Maya, you need to learn to sew and start selling Velcro-free Barbie wear.  She looked at me weird at first as she slurped her chicken noodle soup.  I said “I can send you to classes at JoAnn’s!”  We did a quick search on the web and could only find one woman out of Lithuania on Etsy who sold ‘no velcro’ Barbie clothes.  I told Maya about the snaps vs Velcro and showed her some pictures.  I explained its very ‘vintage’ to use snaps but somehow the industry got away from the trend.  So disappointing.  Perhaps it was cheaper or easier to mass produce with Velcro, or maybe the snaps were a safety issue with young kids or pets ingesting them.  Not sure.  I’ll have to do some research on that.  As I explained to her how it could all work, designing the fashions, make the clothes, starting her website and selling on Amazon, her eyes got wider.  I told her It could easily be done and she just had to believe in herself.  I did finally get her all revved up and she even came up with a name for her business!  It was fun watching her start to imagine her future success.

So as trivial as this all might sound, that’s where ideas blossom right?  Sure, they may seem far reaching and but I think it’s the ‘process’ of inventing ideas that you know are unique, developing the concept and then getting to the finish line…that is so much more fun and rewarding than the success itself, don’t you think?  Thank you for tuning in!