Mum of 2 Launches £250,000 Business With £5 Sewing Machine
- Emma, 35, wanted to ‘glow up’ her IKEA highchair
- She made her own insert after buying a £5 sewing machine and teaching herself to sew
- People quickly wanted to buy them and started ordering from across the globe
- Business exploded during lockdown and now the business turns over more than £250,000
It’s hard for any small business to get started. Endless hours of hard work, late nights and early mornings, and times where you start to question whether you should keep going.
However, pushing through the hard times is key to success - and this is a concept one mum of 2 knows all too well after working for years to turn an idea and a £5 sewing machine into a £250,000 business.
Emma Cattell, 35 from Leeds who has two children aged 7 and 2, told money-saving community LatestDeals.co.uk: ‘I had my first baby in December 2015. In March 2016 I had ordered the infamous IKEA highchair after lots of recommendations but when it turned up it came with an ugly striped cushion cover for the insert.
‘I instantly thought to myself “That's so ugly, I’m going to go online and find a pretty pink one that I can wipe”.
‘The search online turned up nothing and I thought “Surely I can’t be the only one to have ever thought of this?” Turned out I was.
‘I knew I wanted something that didn’t exist. So I went to the local car boot and bought a second hand sewing machine for £5. Then I got a metre of oilcloth fabric and my mum taught me how to sew. I had made my first IKEA high chair cushion cover.
‘I started posting pictures of my daughter online, not mentioning the chair cover or even promoting it - but people would notice it and ask where I had got it.
‘When I told them that I had made it they would respond with “you should sell them!” Well, I didn’t think you could make a business out of chair covers, it just seemed a bizarre concept!
‘At the time I had moved to a new city away from family and friends, I had a young baby and was a stay at home mum. My husband was out at work Monday through Friday.
‘One day I just woke up and thought to myself that I would list them on Etsy and if I could sell one a week it would give me something to do whilst my daughter napped. Plus I’d feel really happy that I would sort of have something for myself.
‘So one day out of the blue I just decided I would list them. And they started selling immediately. They weren’t just selling in the UK either - people bought them from Iceland, the USA, Australia, Tel Aviv, France, Germany…basically anywhere that had an IKEA.
‘Panic set in - I couldn’t actually sew (I had fumbled my way through my own under the watchful eye of my mum but that's the first thing I’d ever made!) How was I going to make these orders?!
‘In the beginning I didn’t know what I was getting into. I never intended it to grow to what it is today. So I’ve really been learning on the job from the very start. I was literally learning to sew as I went along!
‘My biggest obstacle came when I was pregnant with my second child and the business really exploded during the 2020 lockdown. I didn’t have any maternity leave and I was working around 90 hours a week.
‘I had not fully moved over to manufacturing and was still making a lot of my products by hand, by myself. I made over 1000 covers in lockdown and had blistering on my hands at one point from all the cutting of the fabric. I was also homeschooling our daughter who was 4 at the time.
‘After my second child was born, even on the day I had him, I was literally answering emails between being sick from the anaesthetic of a C-section. It was a really hard time and two years on I feel like I'm only just coming out the other side of the toll it all took on me.
‘It was at the time I had Jasper that I moved everything over to manufacturing and stopped hand making things myself. I knew at that point I had to have my things manufactured to keep up with demand or someone else would. I hadn’t got this far to only get this far!
‘It was difficult. I’ve made lots of mistakes (expensive mistakes at that) and I’m still learning all about manufacturing.
‘Staying passionate about the business is easy. Look at what I’ve built. Literally from my dining table whilst raising my children. I think I had completely lost myself after having my first child. I was supposed to do a MSc in Nursing but fell pregnant and then wasn’t able to pursue this as it was the last year that the course was covered by a grant.
‘I just felt like a failure, I didn’t know where I belonged, or what direction my life was going to go in. I knew I wanted to work but having a child and not having a support network to help with childcare meant it wasn’t realistic for me to be able to put my daughter into childcare whilst I pursued a career. Bobbin and Bumble is like my 3rd baby.
‘I didn’t want to take any money away from the household so I got two part-time jobs to fund the business. I worked at an after school club on an evening and then Tesco on a weekend, so both jobs I could do around being a full time stay at home mum. I’d started them both in 2016 and was able to quit them both to work solely on my own business by 2018.
‘Once the business could run itself I was able to quit my two jobs. I didn’t pay myself a penny until 2021. I just kept pumping it all back into the business and if I had to, I would stop paying myself again as a way to save money if it came to that.
‘Profits have been on a steady incline since I started, and I have gradually added in more products. At the start, even though I was getting orders, it was still relatively niche. I was selling items that people didn’t know existed.
‘It wasn’t until 2020, when everyone was online shopping, that the business exploded as people became aware of the concept of ‘glowing up’ their IKEA highchair.
‘I started on my dining table with a cardboard box. As the business grew, it took over my dining room. During lockdown it took over my entire house and 2 sheds I purchased specifically in the garden. I got my first commercial property in 2021, which is over 1700 square feet.
‘I now turnover in excess of £250,000 per year. I honestly thought when I started that one sale a week would be amazing as it would just give me something to do. I remember for the first couple of years if I made one sale a day as the bare minimum I was over the moon - so 365 orders a year. I now do closer to 3x that in a month.
‘If you want to start your own business then go for it! Don’t wait. If it's something you truly want then you will get there and figure out a way to make it work. Nobody knows what they’re doing and it’s common to be learning on the job. Don’t wait for the situation to be perfect because nothing is ever perfect.
‘You have to be prepared to work harder than you’ve ever worked before, but hard work puts you where good luck can find you.’
Tom Church, Co-Founder of LatestDeals.co.uk, said: ‘Emma’s story is truly inspirational. She has gone from struggling to find direction in life to crushing it as a business owner.
‘It must have been hard to keep going at times but she has pushed through and now the results speak for themselves.’
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