Maradith Frenkel had her dream job—VP of development and production at Universal Pictures—when her infant son’s eczema sent her searching for a better baby sleeper. She couldn’t find one, so she made her own. That became Little Sleepies, a bamboo-fabric sleepwear brand she launched for less than $20,000, sold out in weeks, and grew a online community of more than half a million members.
What stands out is how little she spent to prove it worked: no ad budget for over a year, and no marketing hire until the business was doing $12 million. Here, Maradith breaks down how she validated demand before spending a dollar on marketing—and let her customers do the selling.
On treating the launch as an experiment instead of an all-in bet:
It wasn’t much of a eureka moment. It was more of a curiosity—like, huh, I really think there’s something here, and no one’s doing it. I knew I loved this product. I knew I would buy it. But I didn’t actually know if other moms would feel the same way.
So to me it was one question: Can I prove this concept? The plan was to order some minimal quantities, put it out there, and see what the response was. If it didn’t work, OK, I’ve lost a little bit of money, but I can go back to the film world and get another job.
I still had a great career, even if I’d fallen out of love with it. Having that fallback made the whole thing feel less like a gamble and more like an experiment I was running.
On launching a first production run for under $20,000:
I invested less than $20,000 for that first production run, and I did absolutely everything myself. I was scrappy to a fault, because it was my money. Every dollar I spent hurt.
In film, I was used to dealing with budgets and line items all day. But when it’s your own cash, it feels a lot different—it completely changes the way you spend. So almost all of it went into product. Product and one photo shoot. That was it.
On selling out in two weeks after planning for nine months:
I gave myself nine months. My thinking was, let’s see if I can sell through this, and if not, no big deal, I’ll go back and get another job in film. Looking back, that timeline was absolutely ridiculous. It’s so short.
Then what happened was sort of the impossible. I had a few thousand pieces shipped to my garage, I wasn’t expecting much—and I sold out within a couple of weeks. All of a sudden I had waitlists with thousands of people on them. It’s the worst, best problem to have.
On spending zero on marketing for over a year:
Zero marketing. I didn’t spend money on it until well over a year into the business. I put the word out through family and friends, and through mom Facebook groups, because I’d already seen the power of those.
I didn’t even make a marketing hire until I was a few years in and already doing something like $12 million in revenue. It was all so organic. I wasn’t running some strategy—I was genuinely just figuring it out as I went.
On making customers the brand’s marketers:
Our customers are our marketers. That’s still the magic and the secret sauce of the brand, and it’s completely organic. The product is great, people love it, and they want to take pictures of their kids in it.
You take a matching family pajama shot, you post it on Instagram, and all your friends comment, “Oh my God, where did you get those pajamas?” The compounding effect of that grew really, really quickly. It was very overwhelming, honestly.
On building a half-million-member community from day one:
From day one I’d built this community, and it’s really part of the DNA of the brand—our own Facebook group. Today, there are over half a million members in it.
At the start, people started joining without me promoting it at all. They were so in love with the product that they were searching “Little Sleepies” wherever they were and finding the group on their own. Later I started inviting customers to join, but it grew organically too. And those people in the community are all ambassadors for the brand.
On not leading with the eczema story in the early days:
Believe it or not, I didn’t even really talk about the eczema connection early on—even though that’s what started the whole thing. My son Gavin had eczema, nothing was working, and I realized his sleepers were actually making it worse. That sent me down the path of researching bamboo fabric and, eventually, building the perfect sleeper.
But when it came to selling it, I led with the softness, the comfort, the functionality, the patterns. That’s what drew people in. Then they’d put them on their kids and see the skin benefits for themselves, and it made it even better.
Hear more from Maradith on Shopify Masters, including how she chartered a 747 to save Christmas, the transferable skills she carried over from Universal Pictures, and why she handed off the CEO seat.
