Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO of Cableorganizer.com (Part 2)

Sramana: When did you start CableOrganizer.com?

Valerie Holstein: We actually started the company 10 years ago when I was nin3 months pregnant with my child. I was still working full-time as a drafting engineer for a screen enclosure company. My husband was working more than full time at Computer Science Corporation. He was a trainer and consultant. He did two years in Toronto, a couple of years in Massachusetts, and he was scheduled to go to Brazil for six months. He was also scheduled to go to Taiwan at the time. I did not see much of my husband. We sacrificed a lot to pay off our house. My husband was working six days a week and I was working five days a week as well as doing extra work on the weekends.

I knew that when my child was born, I wanted to stay home and spend time with my child. I also knew that at heart I was a career woman. I could not be just a stay-at-home mom. I was still independent and felt the need to earn money.

I looked for customer service jobs for a long time with companies like American Express where I could handle calls from home. I was not able to find any job that I could do at home or on the Internet. I eventually gave up and my child was born. My husband and I were in the process of renovating our home office. We had a hard time hiding all the ugly cables we had behind our computers. We had two desktops and a few laptops as well as printers. We had a roommate at the time who had a computer, printer, and hubs.

The room itself was very pretty. We had painted and put in crown molding and a new desk. All of the computer cables made the room look ugly. I was looking for products to hide them or conceal them, and I could not find anything. I looked for a month and a half to find products, and I finally got the idea of putting Velcro straps around the cables to bundle them. I then found a surface raceway at Home Depot that we were able to stick the bundled cables into.

My husband and I thought that we could not be the only people who had that problem. A lot of people have more than one computer or a media center. There are a lot of cables in American homes. We decided, on the spur of the moment, to set up a website to tell people about a few products they could purchase to conceal wires. We only had a couple of pages on the website. After about a week I started getting comments on the website. People were asking us where they could buy the products, so my husband and I decided to purchase $40 worth of inventory in our garage, and we started selling the products online.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping E-Commerce to 16 Million: Valerie Holstein, CEO of Cableorganizer.com
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