Home economics

Party plans are back in the spotlight and women are embracing them as an easy way to shop – and earn.

Inspired by a disastrous shopping trip with her new baby, Chloe, 30-year-old Sheridan Buchanan decided to launch a new career, working from home as a party planner. Frustrated by the shortage of funky gear for bubs, she established Chlöe’s Closet – a shop-at-home party business offering the kind of unique baby goods that she’d like to buy herself. Identifying this shortage has led to a great opportunity for Sheridan to sell – Chlöe’s Closet launched in January this year, and Sheridan has since discovered that her gift hampers, starting at $29.95 plus delivery, have been very popular.

“It started off blindly and, really, I didn’t know what I was doing,” she admits. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would take off so fast. But it all comes down to the fact that new mothers just don’t have time to visit shopping centres.”

It was a trip to her local shopping centre one Saturday morning that inspired Sheridan’s business idea. “The mother’s room was dirty and I couldn’t get the pram into the children’s clothing shop. It was a nightmare heaving the pram out of the car, bumping into other shoppers, then nipping out for breastfeeds. And I went through all that only to find boring, low-quality clothes and accessories,” says Sheridan. “I came home exhausted and thought, ‘Why not do something simple?’

“One evening when Chloe was asleep, I started contacting wholesalers via email and searching the internet for other mums selling great baby goods,” she says. What Sheridan found was an untapped resource of talent creating original products and clothing for toddlers and babies, such as Oobi, Mother Hen and Amanda Dark Designs.

In a serendipitous move, Sheridan emailed a company based in New York (mistakenly thinking it was Australian), which immediately telephoned her, keen to jump on board and provide designer threads for her fledgling business. Having secured her first international supplier, she also found the Victorian-based company MeMeMe, which boasts a celebrity following. MeMeMe’s signature dog tags for mums and dads are tailor made to feature their child’s name and birth date. These one-off pieces adorn the necks of stars such as Courtney Cox, Kate Ceberano and Gwyneth Paltrow, and as each piece is handmade, there’s a two month wait.

Sheridan now does four to six parties a week and, as well as playing host, she’s also found herself taking on the role of mediator. At one party, two mothers began to argue over a set of MeMeMe tags. It just so happened that their babies shared the same name and birth date – and both mums were intent on making the tag theirs. “I had to mediate. In the end, one woman agreed to order a daddy tag and the other got a mummy tag,” Sheridan recalls. “Sometimes people are really nervous when they come to one of my events, but having a baby throw up generally breaks the ice,” she laughs.

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