186 ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Sales of $350,000 in Year 1
Gross profit of $250,000 in Year 1
Customer satisfaction rating > 90 percent after 12 months
Our long-term financial goals include:
Sales of $750K by Year 3
Sales of $1.5 million by Year 4
Ranking in the top three (based on market share) of all online retailers offering custom chil-
dren’s merchandise by Year 3
Net worth of $1,000,000 after five years.
Customer satisfaction rating > 95 percent by Year 3
Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal (BHAG). We want babyyourway.com to be the Amazon.com of
customized baby products! We want to revolutionize how and where customers purchase gifts
for their grandkids, kids, nieces, and nephews. Purchasing off the shelf gifts from a standard chil-
dren’s retailer will no longer be the norm. Parents, relatives, and friends will prefer to purchase
personalized items from babyyourway.com, which will be the most recognized and dependable
company offering unlimited choices for its customers. Receiving a babyyourway.com product
will be an eagerly anticipated rite of passage for every new parent. Our trademarked wrapping
paper will signal the contents are a personalized gift from the heart. Parents will rush to rip open
the wrappings to see the love and care that went into designing the item for their child.
Market Analysis
In the overall market the children’s apparel niche is relatively uncompetitive compared to other
apparel niches. For decades, there were essentially only two criteria that parents used when pur-
chasing clothing for their kids: price and durability. The cheaper the better, but not so cheap that
it couldn’t sustain a few romps in the grass and mud. Now there is a third criterion that weighs
more heavily when shopping for children: cuteness.
Retailers that are struggling for growth in the adult and teen lines are now starting to embrace
the rapidly growing and profitable children’s apparel niche. Old Navy and the Gap (with Baby
Gap) were among the first apparel retailers to mass-market “cute” and unique clothing specifi-
cally for infants and toddlers, and they now dedicate significant floor space and even entire divi-
sions to the sales of children’s clothing. Their successes have gotten the attention of other large
retailers, and now department stores like Kohl’s, Target, and Wal-Mart are dedicating a growing
amount of floor space to children’s apparel. Other smaller national competitors have emerged
(like Gymboree, Children’s Place, and Babies-R-Us) to focus exclusively on marketing branded
children’s apparel. Most large clothing retailers still claim that children’s apparel is less than 5 per-
cent of total revenues, but it is one of the few areas experiencing growth so they are not likely to
abandon this niche in the foreseeable future.
Specific Market. With our focused approach to personalized keepsakes for children, we are com-
peting against much smaller competitors than the general children’s apparel titans mentioned in
the previous section. Where those companies aim to mass market homogeneous product lines,