Home-Grown and Nationally Known
(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)April 15, 2009 by Sarah Blaskovich
Merle Jablin O’Brien
A Colorado mom learns tricks of the trade as a small-business owner.
Every morning when Merle Jablin O’Brien wakes up in her Aspen home, she looks in the mirror and decides the day’s fate. “Today, I’m going to have a great trade show,” she has said in the past, as designer of a new eco-line of bags that are sold in retail stores and at conventions. “I wanted to sell 20 orders that day. And you know what? I actually got 20 orders!” O’Brien laughs. “Should have asked for 30.”
As owner of OlovesM (pronounced O loves M), O’Brien designs bags of all sizes made out of recycled yoga mats that would have landed in the landfill. She’s proud of her 3-year-old brand, which is largely the result of her own sweat equity and home-grown, thoughtful ideas.The bags, priced under $100, have been spotted by mainstream media outlets and were distributed as “swag” at the Sundance Film Festival and various charity benefits.
Her home office is filled with the colorful purses, and the stash bleeds into the living room and the kitchen. Her kids, ages 6 and 10, help cut the hemp yarn to attach tags to the bags, which she ships from her home in recycled boxes. Her invoices are printed on the back of paper her kids have scribbled on. “It’s about keeping items out of the landfills as best I can,” she says. Previously, she was an elementary-school teacher and organizer of environmental education programs that showed children how to make holiday gifts from scraps at home.
The eco-bags are an ironic product, however, since O’Brien admits she doesn’t sew well—she conceived the idea by duct-taping the first prototype. Her kids watched, confused, as she wove the handles from plastic bags. “I look at the first ones now, and I think, They’re not good at all,” she says, laughing. “I had to see if people actually liked these, besides my friends and family.”
Today, the bags are sold in 33 states and Washington, D.C., and O’Brien is proud to say that people other than her mother are wearing the bags, too. More than 100,000 people visit her site monthly, and some post stories of where they found OlovesM bags or how they use them. “I realized, if you have a good product, it really speaks,” she says.
But it was at the very beginning of her startup when the comments mattered most, because they reaffirmed for her that she was building a viable business that would make an environmental difference. More than a year ago, she remembers seeing a woman walking on a Colorado trail near her home, wearing one of her bags. O’Brien went trotting down the trail, running after her. “Can I take a picture of you?” she remembers asking the stranger. “I do kind of run after people when I’m excited!” Not long after, her kids spotted a woman at a sporting goods store wearing an OlovesM bag. Her youngest son proudly said his “mommy” was the designer. “That was really exciting, because my kids were involved. They thought only I was wearing them, until that moment.”
The bags are also a rare commodity for O’Brien, who calls herself a thrift shopper and a backpack wearer. “I have to be honest, I never carried a bag,” she says, also admitting that she’s not the purse type—often leaving the house without makeup on. “My mother is always after me. But I don’t wear any of that stuff. A backpack was the only bag I ever had. So the styles have really grown out of necessity. My kids needed a lunch bag, for instance, so I designed one.”
In the first few years of her business, O’Brien has created a full-time career for herself, her husband, and a few others who sew and cut the bags. She employs people who can’t leave their home or are faced with a language barrier, for instance. And through it all, she says she’s learned a ton about how to run a practical, eco-friendly business. Here are some of the most memorable, insightful tips she learned:
- If you have an idea, run with it.
- It’s OK to be cheap.
- Know what you’re good at and what you’re not.
- Don’t quit.
- If you’re a mom, try “mommy guerilla marketing.” If you’re a dad, it just might work anyway.
- Moms can do everything. But it’s OK if you’re a mom who can’t do every thing.
- Come up with a great name, and stick to it.
- Know when to let go.
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.”
It’s OK to be cheap.
With a startup business and zero profit, O’Brien knew she’d have to be frugal. So instead of hiring a full-time staff right away, she did a lot of the legwork for the company herself. “I realized it would grow organically, and I was cheap,” she says.
She learned that relationships with friends and family members helped her get discounted rates from people she needed to hire, like an accountant and a graphic designer. She found that most of the people who supported her new brand were glad to see it succeed, but it was important that she found trustworthy people to work with. One patent attorney, for instance, told her it probably wasn’t worth the $5,000 to get a patent when she began the business. For that reason, she was able to take that $5,000 and invest it in the company. And when she needed an attorney later, he was still there for her.
Know what you’re good at and what you’re not.
O’Brien assents that for many startup companies, hers included, she was a jane-of-all-trades, doing more than she was probably capable of. She learned that sometimes it’s best to pay other people to do the things you’re not good at. For those things she could learn to be better at, she diligently worked on developing the skill.
“I was never the best writer, but I wrote e-mails every single day,” she says. “I try to put out five e-mails every single day to stores or people I think might be interested in the bags.” Since then, O’Brien says her writing skills have improved, allowing her to promote her business in a personal way. “Instead of doing a form letter, I realized, if someone is from Illinois, for instance, I’m from Illinois. I try to make them personal so people don’t think I typed their name into [a form e-mail] and clicked ‘send.’ ”
Don’t quit.
Quitting was never an option, says O’Brien, a scrappy, do-it-yourself mom. “I knew I had a neat idea, and I knew I was going to make a way to make it work.” But the beginning stages didn’t come without their obstacles. O’Brien remembers getting the first set of yoga mat scraps—in Pepto pink, for a breast cancer foundation—and the material was so sticky that her needles kept breaking while sewing. It appeared as though making the bags would be nearly impossible, but O’Brien pressed on.
She visited a sewing shop in Denver that taught her tricks to make the heavy-duty sewing job less daunting. O’Brien, at the time new to the craft, learned quickly. “I was very fortunate that they gave me tools to try,” she says. “I learn something new every day.”
If you’re a mom, try “mommy guerilla marketing.” If you’re a dad, it just might work anyway.
The best way O’Brien has promoted her business is by word of mouth. She admits she’s extremely proud of her bags, and because of it, she talks about them everywhere she goes. She also learned that any business owner who’s a casual talker might not need to pay a PR person to promote their business.
“I went to a trade show, and PR people came to me right and left. They knew I was a newbie. But, I didn’t have any money,” she says. “I use the mommy guerilla marketing technique.”
She also blogs on her Web site, sometimes mentioning the bags and other times simply sharing her thoughts for the day. “We get more than 100,000 hits on the Web site a month,” she says. “Blogging helps my company show up more often on search engines.”
Moms can do everything. But it’s OK if you’re a mom who can’t do every thing.
While O’Brien was toying with the idea of building a new eco-bag business, she and her husband were also owners of a company that rented baby equipment to people—often, celebrities—who didn’t want to lug their cribs and strollers to Aspen. The company was lucrative and brought them into contact with “the rich and the famous,” she says, such as frequent play dates with Michael Douglas’ kids. But with small children, a full-time job and a million other ideas swimming in her head, O’Brien was overwhelmed.
“I remember telling my husband, I can’t do this,” she says. “Moms can do everything, but I can’t do this.” Her husband also had a job in the ski industry, and they agreed to ditch the baby equipment rental business in favor of O’Brien’s new idea. She says it freed them from undue stress and allowed her to take a risk with OlovesM.
Come up with a great name, and stick to it.
O’Brien still questions whether OlovesM was the right name for her brand. But, she was in a crunch when representatives for Aretha Franklin asked to showcase her bags at an upcoming benefit. O’Brien hadn’t yet named the company, but she knew that if the bags were a hit, she needed a name—quickly.
“On the way home, I was playing with the letters,” she says. “Om is an important word in yoga, and my name is Merle O’Brien—that’s an O and an M again. And my husband goes by the name OB, and he loves me. OlovesM.”
She admits that some people “didn’t get it,” but she stuck with it and attached a simple logo to her bags. “At the time, I thought, Oh god, I’m never going to keep this name,” she says. “But it starts a conversation. I can get into the story [if someone asks].” She says the first idea often turns into the best idea.
Know when to let go.
One of the hardest parts of O’Brien’s job, she says, is realizing that some of her favorite styles of the eco-bags should eventually get nixed from her catalog. As designer of every bag, O’Brien falls in love with each one as they are designed and produced.
“Even though I’m attached to them, if they don’t sell, there’s no reason to have them,” she says. “I have to realize that you can’t keep adding styles. You definitely have to let some things go.”
About OlovesM
Merle Jablin O’Brien is a stay-at-home mom in Colorado and owner of OlovesM, at www.olovesm.com. Her company has sold nearly 7,000 bags, all hand-sewn locally.
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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.