My Baby’s First Year Keepsake calendar
The inside story…
My Baby's First Year Keepsake Calendar was created by a small group of five ordinary, working mothers. As friends we often chatted about our roles as mothers and some of the problems we had encountered. This is how our story began… We had all known people who had completed every page in their baby books – some had even found the time to write daily journals! We all felt guilty because none of us had found the time to record our own memories - except for Beverley! Beverley had used her ordinary calendar to make some short notes about important events in her baby’s first year – date of first smile, first time the baby laughed, went through the night etc. What a great idea! Why hadn’t we thought of that! The concept for “My Baby’s First Year Keepsake Calendar” was born! The first step was to decide what we would like to include in a keepsake calendar. We could include spaces for baby’s photos, places for baby’s handprint and footprint. We all agreed that there should be spaces for special milestones like the baby’s homecoming and the First Birthday. How great would that be? We realised that anyone could add a note about the baby – family, friends and neighbours. Those priceless memories could be recorded by anyone – not just the busy mother. Problem solved! What else would be really useful? A place for important emergency telephone numbers – after all, in a crisis when the mother wasn’t about, how else would you find the doctor’s phone number? (By the way, that led to the ‘Memory Jogger’ free gift – we would never forget a birthday or anniversary again!). All of our energy went into creating a product that we would all want to own. Together we just about had enough skills to share the development and design tasks, so were able to keep the production costs down. We wanted to ensure that the price of our Keepsake calendar would not be much more than the price of many greeting cards - which are often just thrown away. We also all agreed that we hated paying ridiculous amounts for postage and packaging. We wanted good quality packaging (a nice box, not a tatty envelope) and we were also adamant that we would not profit from postage. The real work began. The content, design, artwork, packaging, despatch and the marketing – literally 101 things to do. We must have gone through every single emotion on our journey, experiencing both the highs and the lows, but we kept each other going and eventually our ‘baby’ was born! We produced our prototype keepsake calendar and collected feedback from everyone we knew. We then visited baby nurseries and then asked the opinions of many website visitors. The feedback was good and we listened to people’s views, made changes and at last printed our first calendars. Well, that’s the inside story of our Keepsake Calendar! We sincerely hope that you have fun jotting notes on ‘My Baby’s First Year Keepsake Calendar’ and will feel happy that you are able to record your memories so easily. After all, it’s the little things that mean so much… Very Best Wishes for the future from,
Linda, Beverley, Sharon, Melissa and Sue
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