Business Spotlight: CHILDish

By Mathew White

EDMONTON — It started out as such a simple idea.

“I designed the logo for our preschool and it had these cute little clip-art faces that we use, so the idea was to take these faces and put them on dishes and let the kids pick one that looks like them,” said Sarah Stickland.

With a little creativity, Stickland was able to take this simple idea and turn it into one of west Edmonton’s newest thriving home-businesses, CHILDish.

Background

Being a self-described go-getter, Stickland said it was only natural for her to take an active role in the fundraising process at her children’s daycare, Southside Mother’s Day Out.

“I did their fundraising for two years and as part of that, what I kept finding is that it was just chocolates and a bunch of junkie stuff,” said Stickland.

So in an effort to put some new life into fundraising, Stickland said she came up with the idea of putting cartoon faces on children’s dishes.  Over the next couple months, she was amazed at the sheer popularity of the dishes, as well as the amount of positive feedback she was getting from other parents.

“The moms kept saying ‘well you should do this as a business,’ “ said Stickland.  “And eventually I thought, ‘well why not?’ ”

So in January of this year, “CHILDish” was born.

The business

Stickland said the business started off kind of slow.  She spent the first three months really building up the companies’ name and reputation with the help of social media, word-of-mouth advertising and a number of give-a-ways.

“(I wanted) to create a little bit of a buzz,” said Stickland.  “Get samples out there and let people know what it’s about.”

From the beginning, Stickland was quite adamant about sticking strictly to dishes, but as she kept coming up with more and more ideas, she knew she had to expand.

Right now CHILDish sells four different products (dishes, lunchboxes, labels and tumblers) but Stickland said she has more than two-dozen product ideas currently in the experimentation stages.

“I want to do personalization with the faces, but I also want it to be high-quality, good products that I want to use,” said Stickland  “If I’m not going to buy it, I won’t sell it.”

With the back-to-school season upon us, Stickland said the CHILDish lunchboxes have become her most popular item, but she expects the dishes to make a return come Christmas.

She also mentioned that all of the products sold by CHILDish are BPA free, once again ensuring the top quality for her customers.

The future

Besides releasing more products and attending a number of tradeshows, Stickland said she isn’t sure what the future holds for CHILDish.  She said right now it’s a toss up as to whether or not the business will be able to sustain itself once her children start school full-time.

With a recent spot on “Cityline TV” and a feature in “Today’s Parent”, it would appear that CHILDish is well on its way.