FEATURED MOMPRENEUR: TINY REVOLUTIONARY

The "TastyMom" award signifies our Mompreneur-of-the-Month. This award is for Moms who still manage to stay tasty despite all the hustle and bustle of being a mother & owning a business.  This month, the "TastyMom" award goes to...BreeAnne & Courtney, the owners and founders of Tiny Revoluntionary! Tiny Revolutionary is about the new face of family, the modern family. The family that isn’t validated by the composition of their family portrait, but by the love and support they share with each other. Tiny Revolutionary is here to help create a community, a story, that these families can relate to, inside which they can find their own form of family reflected. We will take small steps together and before you know it, we might just start to make a positive change in the world.

How did we decide to start Tiny Revolutionary?

Some revolutions start with a fist in the air against the man, some start with a revelation of consciousness against a prevailing ideology and some, like in our case, start with something truly magical - a baby. Prior to being a mom, I had been many things – an activist, a filmmaker, a writer and more recently, a corporate executive for an apparel company but with my daughter Vivianne’s impending birth, came a new perspective on everything, including shopping. I passed the long nine-months waiting for Viv to arrive by shopping online and spent most of her would-be inheritance on cool baby clothes. It was classic retail therapy. However, along the way, I noticed a real hole in the market for hip, not in-your-face, socially conscious clothes for babies and kids. Plus, there were few options for blending philanthropic giving with truly cool products that somebody would want to own or give, regardless of their do-gooder status. This got me thinking . . . A LOT. A seed was planted and with the birth of Vivianne in October 2006, a little sprout hit the surface and a Tiny Revolution started to take shape.

My partner Courtney and I were both working as Operations Directors prior to Viv’s birth but as we neared the date of our joint maternity leave coming to a close, we knew one of us would be making the jump to stay home full time. Since I am the creative side of the business, it made more sense for me to leave first. So, I left my executive position at a clothing manufacturer in February of 2007 to stay home full time with Viv and work on launching TR. Courtney remained at Home Depot Corporate to keep the Revolution funded and now spends her nights and mornings attending to the financial side of the business before clocking in her 10 hours at Home Depot.

I gotta say, I had no idea how challenging staying at home with a child full time would be. It is, without a doubt, the hardest job  I've ever had - WAY harder than managing 100 employees and million dollar budgets. Those things are a walk in the park compared to being at the whim of a child 24x7. Add on the need to pack in building a Revolution (even a tiny one) and the days are nothing short of a non-stop roller coaster ride filled with excitement, fear and the occasional puking episode - usually the kid, not me. But it's AWESOME! Courtney and I sit in bed at night in our pj’s on dueling laptops while whirling through the TIVO queue and can’t help but think how lucky we are to own our own biz. If we want to live on top of a mountain or at the edge of the sea, we can and the best part is that we're making a positive impact in the world. Our This Shirt Saved a Life partnership with Africa Aid has already raised enough money to feed every child in the village for a year! Now we're we’re getting ready to launch our new program inspired by this project called “The Giving Tee.”

The Giving Tee program will work with children’s charities to produce super cool, graphic interpretations of their work and donate huge chunks of the revenue directly to the charity – anywhere from $10 - $20/shirt. Some of our upcoming partnerships are with a children’s music charity called Rock for Kids that provides instruments and lessons to homeless and underprivileged kids, a tee to benefit IKAT which build schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a way to encourage peace in the region and even a shirt with Smile Train, the charity that provides cleft palette surgeries for children in third world countries. Very exciting stuff and though it means we’ll be up even earlier than our current 5:30am wake up, we couldn’t be more excited to be taking our little revolution in this big direction.

Our company, our story, just emphasizes the veracity of our tag line: all change begins small. If you have a dream, an idea, do what you must to bring it to light. It will not be easy, it will require great sacrifice, sleep, for instance, but once you start to make a difference in people’s lives, you’ll be hooked. We’re proving that even small revolutions can make a big difference.

Viva la (tiny) Revolution!