A graduate of the University of Utah, Hayley is a well-educated, upper-middle-class suburban housewife and mother. After fourteen years as a college counselor at USC, she left her position to enjoy a more flexible schedule with her family, living in a California beach community. As manager of her daughter's softball team, she took on the job of designing and ordering T-shirts for the team members and parents from local screen printers.  

The experience stimulated her interest in potentially making it a business. She discovered the direct-to-garment printer at a trade show and recalled, "I just fell in love with the technology."  Since it was compact, clean and easy to operate, she knew she could run the system at home. She figured she would be able to get orders for more T-shirts for the other softball teams in the league since she knew many of the parents. After extensive research, she decided to purchase an AnaJet Apparel Printer and go into business with a graphic designer and fellow softball parent.

A great deal of her T-shirt business came through word-of-mouth-the kids' softball league, soccer league, school PTAs, local businesses and community organizations. Most of her orders are small runs.  But the smaller orders are fine with her since she loves customer interaction and expressing her creativity. Her smaller orders are also offset by her ability to charge higher retail prices.

Haley placed her first paid advertisement recently in a kite surfing magazine.  Husband Dan is an avid kite surfer and encouraged her to explore kite surfing T-shirts. As that part of the business has grown, her husband has become increasingly involved.  He helps design the T-shirts and recently marketed them at a Pismo Beach Kite Surfing Festival.  The couple has signed up with retail outlets in Maui and Florida, and they are emphasizing kite surfing in their decorated apparel business. This represents a niche market, but they would rather be the big fish in a small pond.  They are currently looking for additional worldwide outlets and licensing of their kite surfing design.

Hayley is also very active with Internet marketing. She has five Web sites. UBUDesigns.com is her main site, which includes an e-commerce store. The majority of her kite surfing shirt sales comes from KiteTs.com. Her new site, UBUsurfDesigns.com, appeals to the regular surfer crowd. She also has FastPitch.com, which sells T-shirts and accessories to the softball community. Her WidowTs.com site pokes fun at her husband's growing addiction to kite surfing, and it hopes to appeal to golf widows, baseball widows and others.  It is evident that all of her sites and marketing themes are oriented to her personal interests, which is a very powerful marketing method.  An important dividend from this approach is that Hayley enjoys what she does since she can personally relate to her customer community.          

Looking back, Hayley recalls there were some hurdles during the startup phase.  But after a few months, when the local community became familiar with her business, it began to pick up speed.  By the end of the first year of operation, she had earned enough money to buy out her partner.  Since then, she has been reinvesting her profits into expanding and building the business. While she sometimes considers moving the business out of her house to a commercial space, she enjoys the flexibility and convenience of working from home.

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