Puggle Baby Australia
I’m standing at my desk in our spare room about to click ‘LAUNCH PROJECT’. I think “wow, this is actually happening”. It’s a mix between excitement, apprehension and a feeling of ‘Holy sh*t, what if this doesn’t work!’ It was May 8 this year and we were about to launch our Kickstarter campaign for our fourth major product. We created this campaign to get the funding to create this product. If it doesn’t work, we don’t really have a Plan B.
By the time you’re reading this, our campaign will have finished, and we will hopefully have funded our product and have a glass of bubbly in hand.
Let’s go back to July 2016 though. Leaving my job for maternity leave, I had no idea about the new woman I was about to become. Not only did I learn so much about myself and what extremes I could be pushed to with a beautiful little baby, but I also found a new passion for starting and growing a business with my husband, Nathan.
I like to think that our business journey has followed a similar developmental path to our two-year-old daughter Tanner.
Conception;
I won’t go into the graphic details, but let’s just say there was wine involved and at the end of it we were both tired.
Seriously though, the idea of starting our business came about when we were planning our finances for me going on maternity leave. We quickly realised that to maintain our lifestyle when we had a baby (lol, we know now that that kid free ‘lifestyle’ is long gone), either Nath was going to have to work a lot more hours, or we would need to find some more money somewhere. This was in September 2016. Tanner had just been born in August.
Newborn;
Our original business idea actually came about from Facebook post we saw about selling products on Amazon in the USA. In theory it was easy. You find a high selling product without much competition, find someone to make one (after slightly altering it for your own brand) and you send it to Amazon’s warehouse in the USA. After that, your product will just sell itself and you just sit back and receive money each month.
So that’s what we did. Nath signed up for an online course to find out how to do it, and we set to finding a product to sell.
The first question to answer was; ‘what industry do we want to be in?’ And the resounding theme was BABIES. We had just gone through the process of buying everything for Tanner and found that so many products were over-priced and/or weren’t really what we were looking for. We thought “we can make products better than these.” So that’s when our brand, Puggle Baby Australia was born.
So over the next 4 months, we found a suitable product and a manufacturer to make it for us.
It was like being first-time parents to a newborn (which we were at the same time). We really had no idea what we were doing, but we were learning on the job.
Rolling Over;
At this stage we got a little bit excited. ‘One product wasn’t enough to start a business’, we thought. I know how to sew too. ‘Why don’t I make some handmade baby items?’
Looking back now, I may have been over-extending myself a bit, with a 3 month old baby to take care of as well.
This phase was frustrating. I was putting all of my efforts into making handmade items, like Baby play mats, Hanging mobiles, Silicone Necklaces and tummy time pillows. I like to think of it that I was constantly going back and forth not really getting very far.
So, if you can picture your little one rolling over back and forth, or perhaps even getting stuck on one side. That was me.
Sitting Up;
As Tanner was seeing more of the world from a different angle, in this phase we thought that we should too and decided to invest the time and money and become a vendor at the Melbourne Baby Expo in February of 2017.
There we would see lots of potential customers and really get a feel for the industry that we were investing our time in. This was a great experience for Nath and I, although we really had no idea what we were doing, we didn’t even have business cards and had only set up our Amazon listing in the USA a month prior.
Crawling;
It at about the 6-month mark when we decided to move our business focus from Amazon to back here in Australia. We were finding that selling on Amazon was a lot harder than we thought and we were finding it quite difficult to make it profitable.
As Tanner was sorting out her movement and develop her coordination more, we soon got a better idea about our direction and what we wanted to provide our customers.
We had developed a bit of interest from the expo but didn’t even have a functional website set up to service our Australian customers. So, our crawling phase consisted of coordination between our basic website and, what we were doing in the USA and developing our brand messaging.
I like to think of this much like Tanner trying to coordinate her chubby little hands, her legs (that she only just worked out are useful) and working out where she wants to get to.
Walking;
This phase was a clumsy phase, but when we all found our feet (Tanner included) it was a huge turning point for us.
Nath and I realised what our business was becoming. It was a realisation that our business coach helped us see. Yes, we went out and hired someone to help us with this stage. Just like Tanner, it was getting to a time where the stakes were getting higher.
To get up on her feet meant that she had further to fall (which she obviously did quite a lot), and for us it was a time where we had invested so much time and money that the stakes were now quite high for us. Just as we were there to provide guidance and encouragement to Tanner, we needed someone with more experience to provide the same thing.
Nath and I both love being outdoors. We particularly snow sports and have spent many years up at Mt. Buller in Australia, as well as many northern hemisphere winters snowboarding in the USA, Canada and Japan.
With the introduction of our Ultimate Baby Adventure Backpack, we were turning into a Baby Brand for adventurous parents, even though we didn’t quite realise it.
It was a realisation that took us a little by surprise, but made so much sense at the same time. We like to think about it like this. If Burton Snowboards and Helly Henson had a baby brand, it would be Puggle. The moment we figured this out, everything started to align. And we now we had a true understanding of what Puggle Baby Australia was becoming.
Running;
This is the most exciting phase so far, we are keeping up with Tanner’s fast pace, as well as running a successful Kickstarter campaign to help fund our Ultimate Baby Adventure Backpack.
And just like Tanner, we are not slowing down. There is always so much to do, and we are really enjoying the challenges of growing something together. While it feels sometimes like we’re just running around in circles the living room like Tanner does, we just put one foot in front of the other and look forward to what the day will bring.
A saying that I really love by Tracy Harris from Mums with Hustle is “you are in control of your hustle”. I think about this a lot. Things are not going to happen if you don’t hustle to make them happen. This business has given both of us the confidence and belief to reach out to big brands (and magazines) and try new things, as that really is the only way to grow.
Nath and I really do feel blessed to be able to run our business together and have each other’s full support. We both have very different skill sets (I am a Physical Education Teacher and Nath is a Civil Engineer), which complement each other really well. He likes to say that im good at the creative stuff and he’s good at the boring stuff.
We’ve said to each on a number of occasions that either one of us probably wouldn’t be able to do this alone, but together we are killing it and are really excited for the future!
About Tiffany Droge
I’m a Physical Education teacher by trade I have a two-year-old daughter, who is the inspiration for all that I do. I founded Puggle Baby Australia alongside my husband Nathan in 2016. We create Baby Accessories for adventurous parents and are about to release our fourth product in June.
I am passionate about children being active and try to encourage adventure wherever it can be found.
Email; tiffany@lovepuggle.net
Puggle Baby Australia;
Website; https://pugglebabyau.com
Facebook; https://www.facebook.com/pugglebabyau
Instagram; https://www.instagram.com/pugglebabyau/
Twitter; https://twitter.com/puggle_baby
Pinterest; https://www.pinterest.com.au/pugglebabyau/