Tell us about The Stork’s Warehouse! When did you begin this business endeavor?
Rose: We are a brand new business. We just opened in 2019! The Stork’s Warehouse is all about offering parents and parents-to-be great pregnancy, newborn, breastfeeding, and postpartum products they can trust at great prices. One of our business’s most unique qualities is that we have hand-selected and tested the products included in our gift boxes. These gifts are chosen by mothers who are also practicing doulas that have been working with expecting families years.
What products or services do you offer?
Jennifer: We offer maternity and baby products as well as gifts for every trimester of pregnancy. We also have items centered around the postpartum experience, breastfeeding, and life with a newborn. Our most popular products are our subscription boxes where you can select a different themed box to be shipped to you or someone special you care about each month. We also have several new gift boxes in the works. Most importantly, everything at The Stork’s Warehouse is mother-tested and doula-approved. We have hand-selected products that we feel parents would benefit from the most, and that would be of great value to them as they move through the various stages of pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond.
Rose, you run this business with another mama. How did you know each other before, and what was the inspiration behind starting your own business?
Rose: Jennifer and I are both moms, advocates, and birth professionals who met through the doula community. In our experience as birth pros, we both realized a portion of the services we were providing our clients included sharing recommendations for exceptional and quality products that fit our clients’ various needs throughout their pregnancy, postpartum, or breastfeeding experiences. We wanted to apply our real-life experiences to our new business and continue helping expectant and postpartum families. From there, The Stork’s Warehouse was born!
Jennifer, how do you hope to impact and help moms/pregnant people with your products and baskets?
Jennifer: We are hoping to take a lot of the guesswork and stress out of being an expecting or new parent. We launched our company with our hand-curated pregnancy, and postpartum related gift boxes, our hope for The Stork’s Warehouse is to see it evolve into a resource hub where families can find everything they need regarding pregnancy, postpartum, breastfeeding, and newborn care in one place. We have a lot of big plans for the future!
How does being a mom yourself impact and influence your product selection at The Stork’s Warehouse?
Rose: I think of what I want to see in a product I would use for myself or use with my children, and I consider that with every item we test and evaluate. We look for quality ingredients and composition, reasonable pricing, convenience for our customers, and ease of use.
What inspired the idea behind The Stork’s Warehouse, and how did you leap to running the business full-time?
Jennifer: The idea for the gift boxes came from Rose. She reached out to me one day to tell me all about this new business that she wanted to start, and I immediately loved the idea. My husband and I had talked for years about wanting to own and operate a maternity and baby store. We ended up starting Hemp Maiden instead, a Lubbock shop and online store centered around hemp and all-natural products. By the time things finally started settling down after opening Hemp Maiden, I was ready for something new and immediately asked Rose if I could come in as a partner. I was able to bring some of the ideas and prepwork, my husband and I had done in the past when we were developing the maternity and baby store plans. My husband suggested the name The Stork’s Warehouse for this new adventure, and from there, Rose and I hit the ground running.
What has been your biggest struggle so far, and how did you overcome it?
Rose: One of the biggest struggles we have had is trying to run numerous businesses simultaneously. Between both of us, we own five companies. We are both full-time moms, homeschooling our kids due to the pandemic, and still pulling together everything needed to grow a new business. It has been challenging, but clear communication between Jennifer and me is crucial to ensure neither of us ends up doing the bulk of the work. Also, we have to remember to step back and take time off when we need it.
Jennifer: I would say the other biggest struggle is the same as with all other businesses: how to grow and expand during a pandemic. A company like ours is typically built by meeting with consumers in person at trade fairs, baby, and maternity expos. Out of nowhere and due to the pandemic, we lost one of the most significant ways to reach our target market. It was a shock that hit us especially hard since we were brand new and still working on getting our name out there. We had to up our social media outreach, develop our connections with new contacts, and collaborate with others to spread the word about The Stork’s Warehouse.
What is something surprising you have learned along the way?
Rose: We knew there was a wide-open market for maternity gift boxes, but we have been pleasantly surprised by how eager people are to invest in what we have to offer at The Stork’s Warehouse. It was a surprise of the best kind!
How do you balance work and life as a mother?
Jennifer: That was a hard lesson to learn! Fortunately, it is one we both had to figure out as birth professionals. In that line of work, if you do not learn early on how to keep in touch with your family, your roots, you tend to burn out quickly. My family comes together every night to discuss our day, our plans for the next day, joke around and just enjoy being together. Sometimes it is short and sweet and does not involve more than me going over the calendar for the next day, a quick prayer, and everyone heads to bed. But usually, it is a loud and noisy affair filled with a lot of laughter, especially when we call and include my second son (who is in the Navy) on FaceTime. Seven of our kids still live at home, and we have another recent addition to our family, which brings us up to a total of 9. So you can imagine how rambunctious the evenings can get!
What are you most excited about in the future of The Stork’s Warehouse?
Rose: We have so many plans for The Stork’s Warehouse, so many things that we want to be able to offer our customers. Our final goal is to open a brick-and-mortar store where parents can find everything they need for their pregnancy and new baby – from handcrafted skincare products made by small mom-owned businesses to the best and safest car seats on the market. There is a whole world of amazing products out there for parents, and we want to make sure they are easily accessible to them. We have done the research and tried “all the things,” which saves them time so that expecting parents will always have what they need at their fingertips from a company they can trust.
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