'Mompreneur' proves hard work pays off
'Mompreneur' proves hard work pays off
Jennifer Fiander has parlayed a family joke into an eBay award-winning business and while she's not entirely laughing all the way to the bank, she's aiming to be on Oprah one day.
The Hampton mother was recently named eBay Canada's 2008 Mompreneur of the Year, which comes with a $2,000 prize.
After 1,600 transactions on the auction website, Fiander has a 100 per cent positive feedback score and still chats with many customers who search out products at her Lil' Angel Gifts eBay store and on her own website at www.lilangelgifts.com
A graduate of St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Fiander studied here for five years.
She took a double major in English and psychology, before leaving university with her teaching degree in 1998.
While she loved living in the capital city, when Fiander met and married her husband Corey and had her first child Cameron, she needed to be closer to her family in Quispamsis to help her special needs son.
Cameron, now 8, was born with a genetic disorder called Angelman Syndrome. Because of their generally happy and sweet personalities, parents and caregivers often refer to people with AS as Angels.
To Fiander and her husband, Cameron became their Little Angel Man, but he came into the world with a litany of ailments - little or no use of words, seizures, sleep disturbances and problems walking.
As an infant, Cameron slept so poorly, Fiander quickly became a sleep-starved mother.
To give her a break, her mother Cherri Belyea volunteered from time-to-time to take her grandson, but fretted about the proper way to look after him.
"Just as a joke, I did an instruction manual that would accompany Cameron and I put it in his diaper bag," she said.
For fun, she likened her baby to a product that required fuelling and waste disposal handling.
"People always said babies should come with an instruction manual and now they do," Fiander told Belyea.
Fiander wrote the book in 2000 in the wee hours of the morning on a beat-up laptop that barely had enough memory to run her printer.
"I laid it out, printed it off and took it to Staples at the time and had it all bound and ready before I told my husband I was working on it. I just tinkered with it and got it done and stuck some clip art in it.''
When she showed it to her husband, he thought it was cute and assumed she'd bought it at a store. When he realized his creative wife had written it, he was gung-ho for her to sell it.
"I had shown a few to family members and I had given a couple away at baby showers," Fiander said.
Through word-of-mouth, she started to get orders for the Instruction Manual for Babies and produced them from home.
Her second book - Organizing Your Child's Special Needs - is a journal to write down everything you have to remember or are likely to be asked about your child.
"Cameron had a lot of doctor and hospital visits in his first two years of life. Medical students would ask you the same questions over and over and they always want a thorough history of everything. They want to know dates of hospitalization. When did the problems with seizures start? What type of medications were they on? How long were they on them? What were the effects?" Fiander said.
"I needed a little book to keep everything straight and I needed it small so it would fit in a bag. I did it for myself, but I made a copy of it and put it on eBay (in 2002). That was my first eBay experience.
"Parents found it on there and they just started bidding it up and up and up and there were bidding wars for the book. So, it was obvious, they needed this too.''
Eight-months pregnant with her second child, Fiander borrowed $5,000 from a business organization that helps budding entrepreneurs. She purchased a better computer and a binding machine so she could make the books at home.
Armed with another $2,000 training allowance, she took a course in HTML, so she could use the computer language to develop her own website, in addition to selling on eBay.
With the success of her two journals, Fiander branched out. She's written all kinds of diary-style journals for all occasions and for all types of people.
Her favourite product is her wedding party journals where brides can give a mother or father, spouse-to-be or other special people in their lives thoughts about their relationship under such headings as "Advice you have given me that I'll always remember" or "What you've taught me about things, life or myself."
The journals are unabashedly sentimental - as Fiander freely admits is a facet of her personality - and guaranteed to generate tears.
Although there's huge competition in the wedding market, Fiander has excellent word-of-mouth reviews.
Australia and United Kingdom customers are lining up behind her primary market in the United States to buy journals and she's added e-journal products to the mix.
To produce higher-quality books, Fiander now farms out production, which has increased costs and she hasn't hit the big payout yet.
"I'm in the in-between stage. Every year, I'm steadily growing a little bit more and a little bit more."
While her son Cameron now goes to school, along with his sister Kennedy, 6, Fiander still has a two-year-old daughter Peyton at home.
"My plan is to just keep growing my business a little bit more every year until she goes to school.''
Fiander said anyone who has seen her journals, keeps encouraging her.
"Whenever I would take that little record book to the hospital, the nurses would says: 'Wow, you're going to make Oprah some day,' " Fiander said. "It would be nice."
Her husband is 100 per cent behind her, but since the salesman has really good health insurance, Fiander said she won't let him quit his day job.
"He believes in me and he's stuck behind me, but he's waiting for the big payout. It will come," she said. "It's growing, so I'm happy. I have a balance."
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