WITH a P100,000 capital, senior Entrepreneurship majors Kristine Gonzales and Edric Ng Cha brought their undergraduate thesis to life with “Urban Mom,” an online shop offering maternity and breastfeeding products.
Gonzales said their business was inspired by Ng Cha’s cousin who ended eight years of infertility.
“We saw how she cared so much for her precious baby that she researched everything from the benefits of breastfeeding to the proper way of raising a child,” Gonzales said in an e-mail to the Varsitarian.
‘Modern mothers’
Gonzales and Ng Cha joined online groups to observe and research about modern mothers. They found out that modern mothers were very hands on with their babies, which was different from the past decades whereas mothers leave their babies in the hands of their nannies. With this result, they decided to innovate maternity products to satisfy the needs of modern mothers.
“Urban Mom focuses on locally made products. We have the value of the products we offer and we aim to make the lives of moms simpler and easier,” said Gonzales.
Their business offers maternity and baby products, but focusing more on breastfeeding mothers. They also have a line of product named “Milking Treats” which is a lactation snack that boosts milk production and popular to mothers because it helps in breastfeeding especially to those who are low in milk production.
At present, Urban Mom is still an online based business and may be found in several bazaars like Baby and Family Expo, Ustepreneur and Babypalooza. According to Gonzales, the business still has room for improvements to make it more successful than it is now.
“[It] has limited distribution of products, the company wanted to create a way to have wide distribution,” Gonzales said. “There is no better sales agent for us other than mothers because they personally need the product and have a better understanding of the product.”
Like a first time mother, the students-turned-business partners were also careful in taking care of their first business because they have to keep the sales high, while ensuring sustainability for a year as a completion for their thesis implementation.
For Gonzales, being a student entrepreneur is hard because balancing academics and the business at the same time is stressful enough. Sacrifice like being absent in class because it coincides with a bazaar they joined is only one of the difficulties they experienced.
“[However], for us it is [still] a good experience because in that way, we are being pushed to exceed our limits and give the best that we can,” she added. “We also earned a lot of good exposure to the real world.”
