Mumpreneur Feature & GIVEAWAY – Lucy ***CLOSED***

The lovely Lucy from Who Loves Me? is on my blog this morning sharing her experience of running her own business with us and she is also giving away a large pack of personalised flash cards for your baby or toddler! So keep reading right til the very end x

Who are you?
I’m Lucy Morley, co-founder (with my husband, Dom) of Who Loves Me?. We live in London with our two young boys and a cat.

What do you do?
We make personalised flash cards for babies and young children – basically beautifully designed flash cards into which we integrate photos of your family or friends – each card in the pack shows a different person with their photo on the front and a brief description on the back, so every pack is totally unique. The cards help your child recognise family and friends from a young age and show them how much everyone loves them (especially useful when grandparents live long distance and can’t get over as often as they’d like!). They also help to enhance and encourage communication and language skills, they are an excellent tool for learning to read and make a great starting point for conversations for older children. They’re also really fun to play with! The cards are excellent quality so we also sell a lot of gift vouchers as presents for new babies, birthdays or christenings.

When did you establish your business?
 When we had our first son, the grandparents would come over every couple of weeks, but to a baby a couple of weeks is a lifetime and he wouldn’t recognise them straight away or want to go for a cuddle immediately which the grandparents found a bit upsetting. So we made some very basic family flash cards for him and showed them to him in between their visits, and then he would be all smiles as soon as they arrived. After talking to friends we soon realised that other people also wanted to teach their children about their family, and this was the perfect way of doing so. Babies and children love flash cards and personal ones are even better! We then launched the business in 2010.

What made you start your own business?
We’ve always wanted to run our own business for the flexibility it provides while having a young family, so when we came up with these flash cards as a concept for our own child it seemed a perfect product to make available to everyone.

What do you love about working for yourself?
The freedom to be with my children when they need me. Today my toddler was too ill for nursery and so I spent the day looking after him and shifted my work load to the evening. I love that.

Is there anything you do not like about working for yourself?
You never switch off! Plus the admin side of things (dealing with banks, accountants etc) takes over sometimes-  you have to do all the boring stuff yourself to start with when its your own business!

Is there anything you would go back and do differently if you could?
We were so keen to launch that we did so while we were still trying to iron out the last few teething problems, and so our launch was much more cautious than I would have liked. The launch should be really high impact!

What advice would you give to a Mum considering starting her own business?
Write a business plan to check its financially viable and that you know exactly what you’re getting into.  But don’t be afraid of the pitfalls. You learn from them and they will eventually make your business even better.

Lucy is giving away a large pack of personalised flash cards (worth £17.99) – Take a look at Who Loves Me? for more information on the flash cards!