Whoa Momma!

Rebekah Stivers had an old business plan, to make lingerie for pregnant women, which she unearthed last year to launch Whoa Mamma! A newcomer to the apparel business, she first tried U.S. manufacturers until lucking into a great relationship with an entrepreneur in Hong Kong, who helped her fill her first order from a Target buyer this spring. A risk management consultant, she recommends a cautious approach to entrepreneurship.

“The idea was born in 2001/02 when I was a salesgirl at Victoria’s Secret, and I was getting my MBA at American University in Washington, D.C.

Pregnant ladies would come in and say, ‘Don’t you have anything I can wear? I’m tired of wearing my husband’s shirts.’

I did some secret shopping at other stores, and for the buyers it was like therapy. They’d say, “there was nothing when I was pregnant.” That’s how it was. There was nothing.

So I wrote the business plan and then I kind of doubted myself. I didn’t have a lot of corporate sales experience, I didn’t know manufacturing.

Cut to August ‘07, I’m a consultant on business risk at Marsh & McLennan in the Twin Cities. I had moved into a position where I was traveling 150,000 miles a year, but learning a ton, talking about broader operational risk of their business with large retailers.

One of the key risks was, clients who had one manufacturing site. We would talk about the risk of business disruption. So I have four manufacturers, and I have a backup designer, and I probably wouldn’t if I didn’t know about that. I have backup in all areas.

In ‘07 I was watching The Big Idea, the TV show, and sure enough there was a lady with a maternity lingerie company. She had built a $3 million business. So I jumped off the couch. I still had the box with my fabric and a sewing machine and I dug out my business plan.

I said, I’m going to straddle for one year, keep my job and start this. I needed to know whether I could do it, whether it was viable. I left my job in July ‘08. At the beginning I wasn’t sure I’d be able to say it would work. I tried U.S. manufacturers, and we got several botched jobs. I would open the boxes, and they’d be so botched, they’d be four to five inches off. You couldn’t even turn the fabric into potpourri satchels. That was the biggest barrier to entry, the manufacturing. Even later, once we went to China, there were minimums of 10,000, they wouldn’t do more than two samples.

My family is from the South and my grandmother worked in the hosiery mills. I thought, I’m going to try the U.S. and that’s why I tried four different manufacturers before going overseas. I thought, we had cousins down South who could check up on the manufacturers. But it didn’t work out, and all that took about 10 months.

Meanwhile I hired MCAD students, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, to sketch and draw, and I bought fabric. We kept going.

I don’t sew, I don’t sketch. I just look at myself as a business owner.

I was working toward the goal of a June 08 fashion show. I said, let’s show 20 outfits, we’ll make them here, we’ll invite buyers and the press. I remember June 1, it was the first beautiful day of the summer. We did it at the View, at the Calhoun Beach Club in Minneapolis, and he let me have the space for free because people would buy cocktails. It was the psychological start: we’re here. You have to start. You can see if people think it’s a good idea.

Our real debut was October 08, at Market Week in L.A. It’s one of the buying weeks for apparel. We had our purple display and a purple carpet and we were all wearing purple. We participated in the Mom2Be fashion show, at the California Market Center that weekend. I paid to participate, and we paid extra to be the gold sponsor of the Mom2Be fashion show, so we got to open and close the show.

It was expensive, but it was very targeted, and it was small. We wanted to be a big fish in a small pond. We had eight looks, and when they came out, I remember thinking, this is cool. The press was packed in, and when our looks came out people immediately would start clapping. I could feel, this is a niche.

Then the Target lady walked by the booth. She said she loved our things. Everything we were showing was over the price target for Target, but we were working on a mass market line with my partner in China. Right there I asked her if she was the exact maternity buyer, and she said no, but gave me the name of the right person, and I BlackBerryed the girl right there.

I showed her the samples, and she said, “I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.” I came back in December, she said the team is raving. It was like an out-of-body experience.

Meanwhile we had gotten the manufacturing in place, in July. I went to China with a girlfriend who was a flight attendant, she spoke Mandarin and Cantonese. We got appointments through the Hong Kong Trade Development Council in L.A.; they set up appointments for you. I met my partner there, Vincy Lee. She was like me. She was in her mid-30s, she had left a corporate job. She took her Nike severance package and started four bridal shops in Hong Kong. We interviewed six companies, you meet in the showroom. Vincy said she wanted to help me. She knew what it was I was trying to do.

Relationships are important in China. We were there for a couple of days, and Vincy and I went out, she showed me the markets, we talked about things. I didn’t know what to expect, I was jet-lagged. I got a good sense about her business sense.

It was fun to meet a woman in Asia, she was nontraditional. I felt she meant what she said. My friend had said, many companies will say yes, yes, yes, to get your business, but then nothing would happen. In four days, Vincy turned around four samples, and they were beautiful. I just found a unique situation.

With Target, we have a test order with them. They placed an order in January, by mid-April we had it filled, and it’s selling just online. They bought six p.j.s and one bra and pants set. They placed a 600-unit order with me. That was my first buyer. I didn’t know the acronyms. Sales are slow, but it’s going.

As a small business, it’s huge to say, oh we’re in target.com right now. I have an appointment with JC Penney in Dallas coming up.

You have to come out and spend the money, in apparel. It’s all my personal finances, lines and loans, in my name. I also have a part-time job consulting in a similar way to what I was before. I would recommend that. I feel very fortunate that the timing worked, where I quit my job and then two months later the economy collapsed. There’s no way I could have gotten the money afterward. I couldn’t have tried for the dream.

Now we’re changing from wholesale to a wholesale/retail model. This week in late July we put a shopping cart up online. We adjust quickly to the environment. You start a business and there’s so much to do, you don’t want to do one-off, drop/ship selling. But we’ve got stock now and we’re going to move it. We’re one foot in front of the other.

I still work the department store angle. Our goal is to get on the department store floor. You need to move half a unit per week to get on the floor. One big thing: We are making a new nursing bra that will have unique features, and be in lime green packaging, that we’ll be shopping to department stores for spring 2010. That would be an entrant, to get on the floor.

Another way that we’re expanding is, we’re forming another LLC now, that will sell a regular sleepwear line and bras for 2010. I have to sell what I love. It was cool to hit a niche, and I just want to push it.

My brain is so full of what I didn’t know, when I started. Vincy said this to me: control the controllable costs. Take the time to check three shippers, three vendors for everything.  I would have done that more meticulously if I had it to do over again.

It would be wise to straddle your current job for a year. I didn’t quit my job until I had no debt, every dime was in place, and I had an 800 FICO score. You can’t just jump up and say, I have a dream. Dream big but straddle for a year.  

It also keeps you marketable, to keep in a corporate setting. When I was in college, maternity lingerie wasn’t even a recognized niche, and risk consulting wasn’t a buzzword. So these things didn’t even exist in the mid-90s.

People seem drawn to the name, Whoa Mamma! They’ll point to my card and say, you’ve got a great niche. It is frustrating that buyers won’t put this on the floor. I think if anyone would give it a try it would be a smash hit.

There’s not a lot of rules in the apparel sector. I suppose it would have been easier if there were rules, because you could just learn them and follow them. Someone could take my product, change it 7 percent, and sell it. It’s easy to be knocked off. It just is what it is.”