In 2003, I had the great pleasure of awarding her the SBA's Woman Entrepreneur of the Year award. Her company, Mothers Work Inc., is an amazing success story that started because, well, she just didn't have anything to wear.
Rebecca Matthias graduated from Columbia with a degree in architecture and then went to MIT to get a degree in engineering. She got married, got pregnant, and saw her life change in a way she never for a moment had considered. She says:
I was trained to be an architect and engineer. My first job out of college was as a construction engineer. I had on my hard hat, and I was walking around the construction site. That's where I met my husband who was the president of a start-up. He was constructing a building, and in 1980 I was hired to work on the project. That's when my eyes were first opened to the idea of starting my own business because he had started three or four businesses. We got married and moved to Boston, and he was starting up another company. I got pregnant and didn't know what I really wanted to do next so I thought I would help him with his business. And that's when I realized how exciting it was to start a business. So I decided that when the baby came, I'd start a business in my home.The new maternity clothing business started to slowly expand, and as it did, Rebecca began to think of ways she could begin growing the fledgling company:As my pregnancy progressed and I got bigger, I couldn't find maternity clothes to wear to work. Then I started thinking about what I was going to do after the baby was born and all these thoughts came together. Then one day, the lightbulb went on. I realized what I wanted to do was to start a business to sell maternity clothes to pregnant women who needed clothes for work. That's how I started my company. I started it as a mail-order catalog company out of my home.
I put together this little mail-order catalog even though I didn't know what I was doing, which I guess was another asset that I had. I didn't have any preconceived ideas of what would work or what wouldn't work, so I just tried a lot of things. r think that's another entrepreneurial thing that people go through, just trial and error. It's no longer a theoretical thing when you start a company, you just have to go out there and pound the pavement, put the product on the market and see if people will buy it.
I found some products in the wholesale marketplace and although they weren't exactly what I was looking for -- because my product wasn't really being made yet -- I was able to find products that were close enough to what I wanted. I was able to put together this little catalog. I used the Yellow Pages to find all my suppliers, like a photographer and a printer, and I picked a couple of national media outlets I thought my customers would be reading, and put in these little one-inch ads. My first adjust said, "Work Pregnant?" and my address to send for a catalog. It caught a lot of people's attention, and they wrote in for the catalog and I had a really strong response.
I stayed in the catalog business for a year or two and built it up, and then realized that if I was going to keep growing I had to get into direct retail. The first retail stores I opened were all franchised and that was because I didn't have the expertise and I thought through franchising I could get partners who would help me. I didn't have the money, and franchisees would put up their own money. I got up to 20 to 25 franchised stores in a short period of time. That was another advantage of franchising -- we could grow rapidly.Took off is probably more than a bit of an understatement. Started in 1982 as a catalog business, Mothers Work, Inc. has grown to become the world's largest maternity apparel retailer with more than 1,500 locations. Since the time of its initial public offering in Match 1993, Mothers Work has added many new stores, acquired existing maternity stores, established new brands, and increased sales volume.I named the company Mothers Work because it was for new mothers who had to work. Over time that changed, and I got into many different kinds of maternity clothing, not just career clothing. The business grew and just took off.
In its first 10 years, the company grew to $31 million in sales volume. By 1999, it grew tenfold to $300 million and since then has doubled again doing $602 million last year. Rebecca says:
I needed business clothes to wear to work and figured if I had that need, other women did also. I like to say that the best new businesses are started by people who have a need, and then they realize that other people have the same need and they go about crafting the business that addresses those needs. I think maybe that's the best way to start a business -- by looking within your own needs and realizing that other people have that need also.Looking at your own needs is a great way of discovering a product or service that others might need. Filling that need might turn into a business.That's what really got me started -- wanting to start a business and then finding a product to sell. I would advise anyone who wants to start a business to look at her life, what does she need and use, what need does she have that isn't being served well, whether it's a product or a service. If you have a need, there are probably other people who have that need also. You may well be able to somehow turn that into a business, to understand as a consumer what product is needed. And that's very important for any business -- to understand the needs of the customer. So one thing I tell people to do if they're thinking about starting a business is to think about the products and services they need in their own lives and then to think about translating that into a business.