How I Built a Baby Clothes Brand Moms Can't Resist

After founding her eponymous children's clothing brand more than a decade ago, Kate Quinn was still trying to make a name for herself in the world of fashion. She placed a bet on direct-to- consumer in the last year. Thanks to moms' penchant for sharing cute pics on social media, her company turned into a cult brand. The prints of jungle animals and botanicals on everything from onesies to quilts are in such high demand that some products are more expensive than the retail price on mom-run secondary markets. When brand loyalists snap up your products, how do you get new customers?

I wanted to start my own company but didn't graduate from the fashion institute. I went for a year and took classes to learn how to run my own business. Baby clothes are not as sensitive to the economy as women's clothes. Even though the economy is bad, people still buy baby gifts. I was looking for manufacturers around the world.

I found some family-owned factories in India and began selling organic cotton baby clothes on the internet. I moved quickly to specialty boutiques after Seattle Magazine wrote about me, because I got more attention than I anticipated. The designs are not usually based on trends. I like to look at interior design. It is often nature based and maximalist. A lot of prints are done by us.

As a brand, we never really broke through as a brand due to international distribution. A supplier wouldn't ship if we had a good year. 40 percent of your year is spent if you don't ship a fall collection on time. There were many canceled and late shipments. We couldn't take our samples to the trade shows because we didn't receive them in time. It was just a bunch of things.

We struggled for a long time. I was done with all of the extra costs, risks, and challenges that came with being an omni­channel brand, even though wholesale accounted for 70% of our revenue. I didn't know if any of the collections would sell at the store. I was disconnected from the customer because it was all about the store.

I decided to get rid of the wholesale business in favor of selling on our website. We used to sell a bodysuit for $11 to a retailer and they'd sell it for $22. The consumer got the wholesale margin. We put the fall collection online and it sold more in the first few days than it would have from the wholesale practice.

The site did $90,000 in sales out of the blue. Up until that point, it averaged between $10,000 and $20,000 a day. The person who caught the eye of the person with a lot of followers was one of our creatives on the photo sharing site. We had a lot of followers on the photo sharing site. We have more than 400,000 today.

We now do 50 to 70 collections a year. Each collection has its own purchase order and bet. We can take more chances if we make 50 little bets. We have the ability to be more inventive.

We use a flash-sale model today. There could be a lot of comments when we announce a collection on Facebook. A majority of those are tagged by their mothers. We get a lot of our attention through social media. Customers are very friendly. Parents like to show off pictures of their children. As a parent, that is part of what you do.

Our challenge at the moment is how to get new customers when our current customers are consuming too much inventory. We still don't know how to predict or forecast because a lot of it sells out in the first hour. It has been difficult to be boot strapped. They would have to support us in doing what we do best if we took on an investment partner. We're going to keep an eye on our customer.