A stressed-out mum came up with a DIY hack using black rubbish bags to help her child sleep during the day and has now turned it into a thriving £1.3m business.
Audrey Buck, 57, wanted to be around her children while they were young, so she decided to become a stay-at-home mom and start her own business to care for them.
The stressed-out mother of three from Southwold, Suffolk, was fed up with her middle child (then four months old) not sleeping during the day.
She complained about her troubles to a friend over coffee, but the friend suggested she keep her daughter's room pitch black so she would feel calmer.
she said: “I had never thought of that before. I took a heavy-duty garbage bag and soldotaped it to the window and my daytime sleep immediately improved. It was very effective, but I knew you wouldn't let me take it.'' There's a bag on the window. ”
Hoping for a more practical solution, Audrey took matters into her own hands and created her own blackout blinds from scratch.
Read more about entrepreneurs
She said: “I went to a haberdashery store and bought some black lining fabric and zipper tape.
“Now that we have removed the blinds, we can raise and lower them in seconds.”
It worked so well that friends facing similar issues asked me to make it for them too, and it snowballed into helping friends with children. We have also received more requests from our friends through word of mouth.
It grew organically from there, leading her to create the official Easy Blinds website in 2002.
she says: “I had some friends who had children around the same time, so word spread.
“The requests kept coming in. I sat down with my husband and asked if this could be a viable business.
“I wanted to stay home with my kids, do school runs, be with them when they were sick or during school holidays, and still earn an income. And that was the beginning.
“I went to WHSmith and had them create my own website and HTML book, and I built my own website and advertised in baby magazines.
“Orders started coming in and it took off from there.”
Her husband, Richard, 56, quit his job as a broadcast engineer last year to work for the company.
Audrey said that even though blackout blinds were commercially available at the time, there were always gaps on the sides of the blinds that let light in, whereas the blinds she made were tight on all sides of the window frame. He says he found out that he was there.
Full blackout blinds were also available, she said, but were very expensive because the design used cumbersome mechanisms.
However, Audrey can achieve the same results with adhesive attachments, which are not only easier to install, but also cheaper.
she says: “That's how we found our niche.”
We started our business with just a few hundred pounds in initial stock, and a book on website building, an ad in a children's magazine and a high ranking in Google search results helped us get off the ground.
According to Audrey, the brand really started to excel after joining Amazon in 2008, which helped increase brand awareness and expand into different markets.
she says: “A few years later, when I had a few staff and was pretty busy, I decided to give Amazon a try, and it quickly became her 50% of sales.”
Audrey says she took full advantage of the university's resources and account managers for small business sellers to guide her.
Help start your own business
There's plenty of help available to get you up and running.
However, moving to Fulfillment By Amazon, which allows businesses to outsource order fulfillment rather than doing it in-house, is a game-changer, easing the burden on businesses and allowing 80% to 90% of their sales to come through Amazon. became.
Turnover in 2023 was a staggering £1.3 million.
A “pivotal turning point” came in 2018 after joining the Amazon 360 program, a personalized consulting firm for rapid growth.
She said: “Amazon has been an invaluable partner on our journey, particularly during the difficult Brexit transition period.
“Without it, our international expansion in Europe and the United States would not have been as seamless and successful.
The scheme provides one-on-one mentoring to small and medium-sized businesses. Audrey said the monthly fee for the 360 program is based on a fixed fee plus a percentage of the previous month's sales.
How much it costs depends on your business and the support package you choose.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that without Amazon we wouldn’t be a £1 million business,” she says.
Entrepreneurs don't stop there either.
Her profits, which have averaged about 15% over the past three years, are invested to further grow the business.
This year, Audrey said she was looking to build a business in the U.S., but noticed that websites in other parts of the world were looking to stock blinds.
She said: “We recently received a request to stock our products in Iceland. We sell on our French website and also have distributors in Australia and New Zealand.”
Audrey says that what started out as a product to help parents with children has now become more accessible, from night shift workers to people with bright streetlights outside their bedrooms or near busy roads. He said he is happy that he has diversified to help more people.
she says: “I'm very happy and feel incredibly lucky. I came into this industry with no expertise or special knowledge, so it's been a much steeper learning curve.”
“I'm home all the time now, seeing my kids off to college. That's what was most important to me and what I wanted from the beginning. Everything went well. I feel very lucky.”
Audrey's top tips for starting your own business
- Stay focused – Don't try to take on too many things as it's easy to get distracted.
- Remember the 80/20 rule. Near-perfection may be more helpful than trying to achieve 100% perfection.
- When you have other demands on your plate, like raising a family or juggling a business and another job, time management is key.
- Hire people with skills you don't have and don't worry about your employees being better than you. This is good.
- Ask for help when you need it. Acting alone can be very difficult, but a little help can save you a lot of time and effort.
- If you need help but aren't ready to hire someone, use a website like People Per Hour. You can buy expertise whenever you need it without hiring staff until you're ready.