4 Wildly Successful Companies Started by Stay-at-Home Moms

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, this week seemed like a great time to give a tip of our caps to stay-at-home moms, including these four who used clever ideas to become business moguls.

1. Baby Food Revolution

Of course only a mother could found such a successful baby food company. In the late 1920s, Michigan mom Dorothy S. Gerber was hand-straining food for her baby daughter Sally when she realized there must be some way to avoid the messy task. She pointed out to her husband, Daniel, that if his family’s business, the Fremont Canning Company, could puree tomatoes all day long, its equipment could probably make short work of other fruits and veggies, too.

Daniel Gerber realized his wife was on to something, and after a year of experimentation – and an extensive search to find the right drawing for their label’s now-iconic “Gerber baby” - the Gerbers introduced their first line of baby foods, a super-yummy menu of strained peas, carrots, prunes, and spinach.

2. Nakedy Butt Time is Money

Donnelly quickly realized that the legwarmers had all sorts of side benefits. They did more than just keep her daughter’s legs toasty; they also protected the baby’s legs when she crawled and made changing diapers a breeze. Donnelly whipped up some stylish designs and began selling BabyLegs to other moms.

BabyLegs proved to be a very lucrative idea. In 2008 the company moved over $4 million worth of its legwarmers worldwide, and in April 2009 United Legwear bought a majority stake in the company and began aggressively expanding the company’s reach.

3. Cashing in on Early Childhood Education

Some parents would just accept whatever the market was offering. Not Aigner-Clark. She shot a video for her daughter in her basement, then edited it with her husband, Bill, on the family computer. She even doodled a logo for the video at her kitchen table.

Within a year, the first Baby Einstein video was in stores, and the series quickly became a runaway hit. Disney bought the company in 2001 after Baby Einstein raked in $12 million in revenue the previous year. After the sale Aigner-Clark gave an interview to The New York Times in which she sounded a little surprised by her huge windfall. “I was just a stay-at-home mom who wanted to expose my daughter to classical music, poetry, not a budding entrepreneur.”

Baby Einstein has had its share of controversy, some stemming from a recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics that kids under 2 should not be watching TV (including educational videos). Disney has offered refunds to people who bought Baby Einstein DVDs, but Aigner-Clark is unapologetic.

"Welcome to the 21st century," she told the Times last year. "Most people have televisions in their houses, and most babies are exposed to it. And most people would agree that a child is better off listening to Beethoven while watching images of a puppet than seeing any reality show that I can think of."

4. One Smart Cookie

Fields nevertheless managed to secure financing for her venture and she opened up her first cookie shop in Palo Alto, California. Fields and her husband, Randall, soon confirmed their suspicions that people really enjoy cookies and will gladly drop a few bucks to get a warm one. The company began a sweeping franchising program, and in the 1993 Fields sold her cookie empire to an investment firm.