Covington Reporter, November 2006

Wal-Mart embraces moms' NursEase shawl Product finds a home in local stores By Kris Hill

Necessity is the mother of invention, but persistence must be the mother of success.

A pair of local moms have turned a small idea for an infant nursing shawl into a growing business. Three months ago, Wal-Mart in Covington started selling their product, and was the first of six local Wal-Mart stores to offer the NursEase nursing shawl as part of its local manufacturers program.

Two years ago, Marie Wakefield, who until recently lived in Auburn, realized that the available solutions for nursing her young son, Jordan, weren't working."I was nursing him in public and the little blankets never covered quite enough or they'd fall down," Wakefield said. "Often, I would walk around and a blanket wouldn't cover the area where your shirt was pulled up."

She discussed the situation over with her sister-in-law, Joanne Gonzales, who had gone through similar problems a few years earlier when her son, Anthony, now 4, was nursing. The pair brainstored until they came up with an idea that would allow moms to nurse comfortably without having to drop what they were doing, or worse, abandon their social lives entirely.

"We did a lot of research on-line and found nothing worked," Gonzales told the Reporter in 2005. "What was out there wasn't functional or fashionable."

Gonzales grew up in Covington, graduated from Kentwood High School and, before she had her son, taught at Covington Elementary School. The pair, who were neighbors in Auburn at the time they developed the shawl, worked tirelessly on the design. Wakefield took some material, knowing she wanted to create something that worked better than tossing a blanket over Jordan and her shoulder. They both knew it had to be something that fit over the head and shoulder. Eventually, through much trial and error, they developed a working design.

"The biggest change is that we did get into the local Wal-Mart program", Gonzales said. "The first thing we did was we got into little specialty boutiques, and the nursing shawls were going great in there."

As the product became more successful, they were able to move more of the work off their shoulders. "We were buying all remnant fabric", Wakefield said. "Now, we can customize the color, the pattern. We had no say, it was just what we were able to track down on the Internet, but now, we have total control."

"We're now in the garage," instead of one of Gonzales' spare rooms, she said. "We do delegate more. We're not doing the folding and the packaging, we're having someone do that for us," Gonzales said.

Getting to the point where the product could be sold locally in Wal-Mart, which could be a stepping stone to selling nationally, was quite an effort. Gonzales and Wakefield had just started the process last summer.

"It took about a year to apply to Wal-Mart and get everything ready for the application. It's quite a lengthy process," Gonzales said. "So, we've been really focusing on the Wal-Mart stores within the district that we have. There are six stores in this district. It's been very busy and very exciting."

With the Wal-Mart program, Gonzales explained, they were able to start with one district or more if they were comfortable with that."Then, every six months you have the opportunity to gain more districts or go national," Gonzales said. "For national, they look at your sales history for the past six months. So, that's where we're really at right now is to keep our sales up

Plans to make the product more widely available are always in the works.“We’re shooting for the starts,” Gonzales said. “We’ve sent a proposal to QVC. That would be a great way to get our product out there. There’s also a local vendor program that Wal-Mart offers. We’re definitely going to pursue that.”

"Just the fact that we've done it on our own...that we've taken an idea to completion to be sold at a store," Wakefield said.