If you haven’t checked out Microsoft’s Small Business Summit yet, you might want to.  It’s free.  Although the live sessions will finish this afternoon, the recorded sessions are starting to be made public.  They are released 72 hours after the session has completed.

On the first day of the Summit, one of the speakers was Julie Clark, Founder of Baby Einstein.  What a great story.   Just like many of us, she started her business out of her basement when she was staying at home with her baby.  In five years, she had a national brand with over $22 million in sales - and with only six employees.  *Wow*


Her presentation was all about passion and the walls we encounter.

First of all, Baby Einstein was not created to generate millions of dollars of revenue.  She, a mom, wanted to find videos she and her baby could view together - and there weren’t any.  So, with a background in English, created them in her basement.

The creation of Baby Einstein was built from the “passion for what [she] loves and what [she] believes in.” It is also this passion and being a mom which made the product so successful - it did not come from a large, remote corporation.

The walls she was referring to were:

  • not enough money
  • no business experience
  • no business plan
  • later on, competitors flooding the market with baby videos.

Her husband and she created a studio in the basement on a table with a drop cloth, rented some video equipment, and editted it on Adobe Premiere.  She worked on it at night and during nap time.

When the product was ready, she wanted it in Right Start stores.  Julie went to a toy trade show, spent two days looking for a Right Start representative among the thousands of vendors and, using her love and enthusiasm for her product, convinced the representative to take it home and watch it.

The rest was history
… $100,000 in sales the 1st year
… $1 million in sales the 2nd year
… $5 million in sales the 3rd year
… $10 million in sales the 4th year
… $20 million in sales the 5th year

And her advertising budget? Zero.  Julie figured that advertising did not make sense because she ignores ads on TV and flips past them in magazines.  When she buys baby products, she relies on recommendations from other moms.  So this is the technique she employed.

When competitors started flooding the market with their own videos, she was asked to mass produce the videos and bring them into all retail stores.  A business that was lots of fun started turning into a fight over priorities - family or business.  She picked family and sold the business to Walt Disney.

Julie Clark’s kids are now older and in school.  She has started a new company, The Safe Side, which publishes Personal Safety Videos for kids… again fulfilling a need she had as a mom for her kids.

She was not a safety expert so she searched for a partner and found John Walsh (we would know him from America’s Most Wanted).  She also learned how to create videos with 50+ people casted.  She started out by donating the videos to schools, but now they are being picked up by Target and Borders.

She recently went back to teaching part-time as a middle school teacher and was recognized at George Bush’s State of the Union address.

To view the recording of this session, go to Microsoft’s Small Business Summit, register, and look at the first day’s participants.