Momspiration: Q&A with Kristen Taylor Owner of Juvieshop.com

Kristen Taylor is the owner of juvieshop.com, one of the best online shops for finding hip tween wear for girls and boys. This year she's added toddler and kids' sizes as well as Kristen works to expand her business. As one of my favorite influential moms in kids' fashion, I've invited her to do a Q&A to share with other moms how she followed her dreams and made her dreams fit into her family life. For your reading pleasure, here's a fresh new piece of Momspiration...

It seems that almost every specialty kids' fashion store is geared towards toddlers. How did you decide to focus on tweens?
As soon as my kids outgrew the baby and toddler shops, I knew that there was a gaping hole in the market for parents who wanted stylish, high-quality threads for their older kids. Not to mention the kids who were fashion-conscious, and were really tired of horizontal stripes for boys and short, blinged-out and ruffled frocks for girls. The question then became, “Well, is anyone even making better clothes for tweens?” Four years ago that was a very small number of designers. Many more have come on board since then. And since so many of our customers have kids in a large range of sizes, we’ve brought in sizes down to 2T starting this year, so no one is left out.

What were you doing before you started juvieshop.com?
I have a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience, and I was doing research up until 2002. That’s not a very family-friendly field, so I left and started doing parenting writing. I published a lot of essays and wrote a newspaper column (which I still do) until 2006, when I opened Juvie and Juvieshop.com.

Do you remember the turning point when you decided to jump into the kids' fashion business?
I remember knowing that I wanted to start a business that was going to be flexible enough so that my kids’ lives wouldn’t necessarily be impacted, and that there were a lot of baby and toddler stores in our Los Angeles neighborhood, but nothing for the older kids. That’s when I decided to open the store. We started online just three months after opening the storefront, and it quickly started to gross as much as the store. When the lease on the store was up, it was an easy calculation to close the store and focus on the online operation. And because we were no longer competing with the neighborhood stores, we could bring in smaller sizes and provide a bigger range for families everywhere.

How do your children influence you and your work?
I suppose it’s always been, “the children come first,” for me. I have always picked them up from school and taken care of homework, activities and such. If the choice is either paying a nanny to do that, or paying an employee in my business to take care of the shop, I was going to be with the kids. That said, they’ve been an integral part of the business since day one, accompanying me on showroom visits and poring over catalogs giving their “yeas” and “nays.”

Give us a mock up of your typical day as a mom and an online shop owner.
The kids are both out of the house by 7:30 am, so that’s when I start my workday. As a store owner you are essentially the head of every department, so I try to give a little attention to everything every day. In a typical day I can fill orders, process new inventory, write a press release, work with our web designer on a marketing email or new graphics, plan a sale, visit a showroom to select items for the next season, catch up on bookkeeping, file a tax return, do some social networking, build links for SEO, or research new products. At 3:00 I pick up the kids, and depending on what they’re up to, I may come back to work later that day or evening, or not.