Sara of Babycakes was looking for a fun, sweet design to showcase her baby products and gifts. We started with the cute little baby with it’s mound of goodies and the rest was sprung from that! Check out her cute boutique by clicking here!
San Diego Tribune Article: Sunday paper - business section
Web-savvy mom’s design firm takes wing from home
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UNION-TRIBUNE February 3, 2008 OCEANSIDE – In designing a Web page for her online baby clothing boutique four years ago, Oceanside resident Staci Brillhart unwittingly tapped into a market niche of moms trying to run businesses from home.
Requests from friends and acquaintances who wanted her to tinker with the Web sites for their own startup companies came streaming in, until Brillhart decided to forgo her baby clothing operation to concentrate on Web design fulltime. Her company, Quirky Bird, now runs with a two-month waiting list and will celebrate its first anniversary this month. Four years after teaching herself basic programming, the Houston-born mother of two employs a remote programmer and customer service representative while completing the creative consulting and design on her own. She has 87 completed Web sites and is working on 23 projects with a nine-client waiting list. Customers pay a $775 retainer to get on the waiting list, paying the balance of Brillhart’s $3,875 fee at the project’s completion. During that waiting time, Brillhart assigns “homework,” asking clients to start defining their ideal site. “I tell them to brainstorm about the aesthetic they’d like to see,” she said. “Find sites they like, sites they don’t like. Observe moods and feelings of different sites. Do they like something edgy or urban? Or something modern, or minimal, or sweet?”
After Brillhart reviews their notes, she gets to work on the basic elements of a company Web site: a logo, a template for headers and footers, and the technical mechanisms and visual appearance of the content area, where product images are displayed. She also works with clients to develop the five printable items that come with her design package; things like business cards, fliers, Web banners, gift certificates, letterheads or stationery. A project’s start-to-finish timeline is usually around two months, Brillhart said, and clients walk away with the copyright. Brillhart says that aside from a natural creative knack, two things stand out as primary assets in a crowded field: personal experience with running an e-commerce business and dedication to customer service. Having built a site for her now-defunct baby boutique, Brillhart says she is quick to point out efficient, productive ways to streamline a small, online business, from shipping and marketing to optimizing a site for online search engines. Working from the Oceanside home she shares with husband Jeff, 32, a restaurant manager, and children Chloe, 4, and Claire, 2, Brillhart is sensitive to the fact that many of her clients work from similar bases. “I have a deep level of appreciation for mothers,” she said. “When their kids are in the background screaming and they’re embarrassed, I’m like, ‘Please, I just told my 3-year-old kid to stop climbing on the walls.’” Brillhart said she has never advertised, but often attracts clients from across the world after they encounter her work online. Former Vista resident Christie Hepworth found Brillhart online when she was searching for someone to design a site for her baby boutique company, Simple Me Boutique. “It was way better than I could have ever done,” said the mother of three about her finished site. “I’ve gotten so many compliments from my site, and a lot of different manufacturers have been so impressed.” Tara Harrup of Kansas City booked Brillhart to design the site for her baby-carrying-sling company, Polkadot Papoose. The site was completed in December. “Since then, I’ve sold out of almost everything,” she said. “I have a waiting list myself. For me, it was the best investment I could have made. I’ve gotten mostly wholesale orders, tons of orders, people saying, ‘I’ll take 30.’ I didn’t expect it.” |
| What started as an online baby boutique venture grew into a home-based Web design business for Staci Brillhart (center), mother of young daughters Chloe (left) and Claire. Courtesy photo |
Oceanside mom rears two girls,
two businesses at the same time
By Linda McIntosh | linda.mcintosh@tlnews.net
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Staci Brillhart was caught in that all-too-common bind: She wanted to stay home with her baby and yet needed to work.
The Oceanside resident solved the problem by opening an online baby boutique in 2004 called My Baby Monkey.
Brillhart had no problem designing trendy clothes and accessories, but her biggest hurdle was coming up with a snazzy Web site.
Since she couldn’t find an affordable designer to build the kind of site she wanted, the 23-year-old took on the task, teaching herself while 1-year-old Chloe was napping.
Other moms liked her creative site, and friends started asking for help building their own.
Questions flooded her inbox and Brillhart found her true calling helping other moms build Web sites and start up home businesses.
Brillhart dropped the baby clothing line to open a Web design and business consulting firm in November 2006 based, naturally, out of her Oceanside home.
She called the company Quirky Bird Designs. Since its founding, she has designed nearly 120 Web sites for baby boutiques, property investors, pet jewelry retailers and companies across the country, mostly owned by entrepreneurial moms.
“It’s more than building Web sites, it’s helping them build their business,” said Brillhart, 27.
“I’m an entrepreneur at heart, and I love helping come up with ideas.”
As Brillhart awaited the birth of Claire, her second daughter, the business burgeoned.
She now has a waiting list for her services.
Kristin Daliso, owner of Born Lucky Online, an East Coast children’s boutique, signed up to work with Brillhart because she was looking for a designer who was creative and had a sense of humor.
“She understood the look I wanted and my business identity,” Daliso said.
Working with Brillhart motivated Daliso to to move into a storefront and do the full gamut of the children’s business.
“As a fellow working mom, she made me realize it is possible,” Daliso said.
Fernanda Pinzon, co-founder and co-owner of a Brooklyn-based baby boutique, signed up but was skeptical at first because she had been displeased with her Web designer.
The first thing Pinzon noticed was how easy Brillhart was to talk to.
“If you have a baby next to you crying, she understands,” Pinzon said.
“She didn’t use a lot of tech talk and didn’t make me feel dumb asking questions.”
Brillhart asks clients about the themes and colors they like, the kind of feel they want to create and sites they like and dislike.
They submit product photos and fill out a detailed questionnaire to get them thinking about their business goals.
“I didn’t have to walk her through my ideas,” Pinzon said. “I just told her the feel I wanted, and she took it from there.”
Brillhart works around her 2-year-old and 4-year-old daughters’ preschool, play and nap schedules.
“She’s an inspiration to me — how she manages it all as a mom,” said Jodi McComb, owner of the Paisley Tree Press, a Quirky Bird Designs customer.
For Brillhart, much of the payoff is seeing other moms’ businesses take off.
“We inspire each other,” she said.
Oceanside mom’s Web designs attract worldwide business
OCEANSIDE — For a stay-at-home mom with two young children and a business that has gone international, Web site designer Staci Brillhart is the portrait of calm.
Although having a husband whose position as a night restaurant manager keeps him home during the day, and a 4-year-old who attends school in the mornings can be disrupting, Brillhart said she would find a way to get the job done no matter what the circumstances or the distractions might be. Her clients, she said, who are mostly entrepreneurial stay-at-home commerce moms, seem to understand the challenges.
From her “office,” a kitchen table in her Oceanside home, Brillhart, 27, recently explained how commonality plays out in her business.
“What I really love about my job is the connection to my clients,” she said.
“They become like good friends, and since most of them are moms themselves, we are all sympathetic to the occasional child-related issue.”
Sometimes, she added, conference calls are scheduled after the kids are in bed.
“Of course that’s a little trickier with my international clients, but we make it work through e-mails and online chats,” she said. “It’s great that we all understand how a sick child can be more important than work.”
As a business Web designer, Brillhart said her designs appeal to more than just the moms.
An Internet search for “hip web design” lists her site, http://quirky-bird.com, fourth on a list of approximately 1.3 million potential hits. This, of course, is no accident. With the knowledge of Internet Search Optimization, she knows how to get a Web site to appear near the top of a search engine — which is part of a Web design and marketing package she offers to clients as well as providing information on how to run an online store.
When asked how she chose the name quirky bird, she said she went online to Dictionary.com, and searched for a word that best described her business approach.
“I came across the word quirky, and one of the definitions was ’strikingly unconventional’ — I thought to myself that’s it!”
The definition also became her tagline, which she tries to infuse into all of her projects.
“Through running my own online store, I learned a great deal about the best way to do pretty much everything, including how to set up a merchant account and even information on the cheapest and most efficient way to package and ship merchandise.”
What took Brillhart from a merchant to a marketer was frustration, perseverance and a lot of time teaching herself all about Web design and functionality.
“It was really hard. I wanted to have a great Web site for my store, and there was no single place I could go for all the answers; there was a little information here and a little there. So, I just decided to teach myself how it all worked, and that evolved into the one-stop business I have now.”
Brillhart attributes much of her success to having a right-brain, left-brain balance. “I’m really creative, but I love the entrepreneurial side of it, too, and I have a lot of good ideas for how clients can grow their businesses.
Although Brillhart’s business is in a niche market, she has clients from all over the world, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Israel.
” I know it’s hard to believe,” said Brillhart, “but I really don’t do this for the money. I get so much satisfaction from helping my clients fulfill their dreams; they really inspire me, and I try to inspire them right back.”
