Home-Grown and Nationally Known
(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)April 15, 2009 by Sarah Blaskovich
If you have an idea, run with it.
O’Brien says she was always a child with big dreams. She calls OlovesM “business idea No. 210,” because she was always coming up with new inventions or ideas, though few made it beyond her imagination.
“My family was like, OK, honey, whatever you’re doing is nice. They finally started taking notice when my bags were picked for Sundance,” she says.
The idea to take yoga mats and fashion them into stylish purses came to her while she was exercising. In a downward dog pose, she kept staring at her mat. “Yoga mats are so not ‘yoga,’ ” she says, citing that most mats at that time were made from PVC pipe, which generally isn’t recycled. That day, she fiddled with a few cut-up yoga mats in her living room and decided her plan could work.
She also found a company that makes yoga mats in the United States, and she learned that they cut off 2 feet from the bottom of every mat during production. O’Brien takes those scraps and puts them to better use.
Her best advice to someone who wants to start a business is, “Go running off a diving board. That’s exactly what I did,” she says. “People said I needed to have a business plan. But people who know me know I’m not a business plan person. My business plan is to make money and to get my bags out there.”
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Merle Jablin O’Brien, owner of OlovesM, has a great story to tell. I liked reading this article. Her bags are sold in 33 states and she gets 100,000 or more hits to her website monthly, which is incredible. I think what she is quoted as saying in the article is correct, when she says it’s all about the product. I wish her continued success.