About

Howdy!  My name is Heather McCarron Allard and I’m a mother of three crazy-cute kiddos, Hope, Grace & Brendan.  I’m also what I like to call a “Renaissance Mom Entrepreneur”.  Since 2001, I’ve started three very different, successful businesses.

No staff.  No nanny.  No daycare.  No mentors.   No mompreneur blogs.

Just me, my three kids and my determination to build a business that allowed me to stay home with my children and earn an income. Oh yeah, and a daily pot of the strongest coffee available and a boatload of mindnumbing educational kids’ DVDs.

The first business I started was HMA Copywriting, when Hope was about one year old. I’d always loved writing and figured I’d parlay that into an at-home gig.  I started off with what I coined my “Port-faux-lio” and if you’ve studied French, you know that “faux” means fake.  That’s right.  I created a “pretend” portfolio, a bunch of “fantasy” work to show that yes, Virginia, I can write. Once I landed some real clients, of course my portfolio became as real as The Velveteen Rabbit.  Soon after, my work landed in BrandWeek and my profile in Peter Bowerman’s The Well Fed Writer: Back for Seconds.

Then Grace was born in 2003 and her sleep “challenges” (strong startle reflex & extreme tossing and turning) inspired me to invent Swaddleaze, a wearable swaddling blanket & sleep sack in one, and Blankeaze, the first wearable blanket with leg openings for “active sleepers” like Grace.  I scrapped my copywriting business and established 2 Virtues Inc, named after my own two virtues, Hope and Grace.

In 2004, I began the arduous, expensive journey of bringing a product to market and what began as a hilarious sketch on loose leaf paper, lead to success.

By 2006, my products were sold in 200+ stores in the United States & abroad, including catalog giant, One Step Ahead, and received favorable press in national magazines like Pregnancy,  New Parent and  Consumer Reports.  Swaddleaze was even on Access Hollywood in the re-creation of Suri Cruise’s nursery! (What a trip seeing Billy Bush holding a doll swaddled in a hot pink Swaddleaze!)

At the same time that I started 2 Virtues, the “mompreneur explosion” began with moms like Julie Clark and Tamara Monosoff pioneering wildly successful companies like Baby Einstein and Mom Inventors.  Fledgling mom entrepreneurs began emailing me for all kinds of advice and I proudly answered each one, and enjoyed advising them.

Then, Brendan was born in 2006 and tipped the scales.  With multiple health issues like RSV, chronic ear infections, insane eczema & severe food allergies (chicken, turkey, tuna, peanuts and tree nuts!), he required — and deserved– my full attention.  I could no longer run a growing company AND raise a growing family.

In 2007, I sold 2 Virtues to Summer Infant, a baby products company in my home state of Rhode Island and hunkered down in my new role as “just a mom” (Ha! ).  Read “A Funny Thing Happened On My Way to The Poorhouse” for the behind the scenes life-changing story of the sale of my company.

The emails from mom entrepreneurs kept filling my inbox, more so now that I’d found the holy grail of entrepreneurship: selling my company.  Never one to single-task for long, I started The Mogul Mom blog fueled by my passion for helping mom entrepreneurs through the lessons learned along my own entrepreneurial journey.

And though I didn’t set out to become a “pro blogger”, my efforts to provide mom entrepreneurs with quality content combined with my secret inner-geek earned The Mogul Mom some top blog rankings (Alexa and Technorati) and landed it in Working Mother,  Entrepreneur and ProBlogger.

You see, when it comes to being a mom entrepreneur, I’ve “done it all” – provided a service, developed a product and built a blog.  I know firsthand what it’s like to build a business between diaper changes and car pool – without breaking the bank or your spirit.

I know the journey of a mom entrepreneur can be a long, strange trip – so let’s travel together.

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