Right at the beginning of telling her story about how she founded the e-shop with products for mothers and children Monkey Mum, Lucie Janauer emphasizes that her goal was not to start a business. “I simply wanted to do something and earn money,” she explains. But within a few years, the small shop grew into a company with revenues of around fifty million crowns, it has several investors, and it sells goods all across Europe. And it all started when she was on maternity leave with her first son, who was only a few months old.
As the thirty-year-old entrepreneur says, she is a Sagittarius by nature, which is also connected with her determination. The role model that led her into business was her father. “I liked the way he lived through his company. That’s also why I always tended to come up with something of my own,” she says. Since the age of eighteen, she had been trying in various ways to earn money, and over the years she launched several projects, including creating custom photo books, organizing photo events where during one weekend they would make up and photograph as many as a hundred families, and also a swimming school.
All of that gave Janauer experience for her next business, which she began to focus on during maternity leave in 2020. When her son was five months old, he fell off the bed. Fortunately, nothing happened to him, but she could not sleep after that. “Hearing a child screaming at night in the dark is pretty terrifying. Children do fall all the time, and in 95 percent of cases nothing happens to them, but an accident can happen,” she explains. She therefore decided to buy a bed guard that would prevent such falls. As often happens in entrepreneurial stories, she could not find any product.
“Even Google couldn’t find anything under the search term ‘bed guard for a double bed.’ I didn’t understand how that could be possible nowadays, when you can buy absolutely everything. But it has to do with the fact that in Europe we are not used to children sleeping in bed with their parents,” Janauer continues. She spent several weeks looking for a solution to her problem, and also considered whether she should start making the guards herself.
In the end, however, she came across a manufacturer outside the European Union, from whom she wanted to buy a product just for herself. But shipping would have cost her twice as much as the guard itself. “So I ordered sixty pieces for one hundred thousand crowns,” she says, adding that she had to take the money from the budget that she and her husband had originally set aside for the ongoing renovation of their house.
She then sold the first guards to friends and acquaintances, while also creating an e-shop on the Wix platform, naming it Monkey Mum, investing dozens of crowns a day in Facebook ads, and within a week the first orders started coming in. She sold out the batch of sixty guards in two months. “It basically went by itself. It was like a part-time job for a few hours a day, I did everything from home and made a living from it,” Janauer smiles.
After confirming that there was demand for such products, she then began to figure out how to really get her business moving. She was missing just one thing for that – money to buy more stock. Banks did not want to lend to such a young company, so in the end her friend’s mother lent her one million crowns and her friend contributed another 800,000. At the same time, she also found professional investors.
“It was very demanding. I was just at the very beginning, I didn’t know anyone, I wasn’t involved in the community of entrepreneurs or e-shop owners,” Janauer recalls, saying that in addition to asking acquaintances, she also posted her request for an investor on Facebook. The reactions were typically Czech: “You think someone will invest in you, right?!” But she was not discouraged, and through a friend she got a connection to an investor, whom she met for coffee.
Matěj Turek also came to the meeting, and he is building a billion-crown conglomerate inspired by Warren Buffett. In the end, he decided to support her. Together with another shareholder František Zeman, the founder of Algotech, they both invested 400,000 crowns each in exchange for a ten-percent stake.
“Matěj supposedly said it was his riskiest investment ever, but also the one that paid off the most,” Janauer laughs, recalling that she then obtained the capital needed to properly launch Monkey Mum. She bought stock and sales began to grow: “However much stock we had, that much we always sold.”
The next major milestone was expansion abroad. The supplier mentioned above had a contract with Monkey Mum as the exclusive supplier for the Czech market. When Janauer asked about other countries, it turned out that the company did not supply any markets in Europe. “So we agreed on exclusivity for the whole EU and gradually started selling in Slovakia, Hungary, Poland… I told the investors that either I would sell all across Europe, or I would close it down,” she says, alluding to her determination. By then, the company was already large enough that banks were willing to lend it money to buy inventory.
The business gradually grew, and over the years Janauer made many small steps that improved the e-shop, processes, and other things. She admits, however, that combining business with maternity leave was demanding. “Pregnant, with a belly, I packed parcels and went to send them to customers. Because of the children I didn’t have time to devote to my employees, sometimes I couldn’t keep up with paying invoices, it was a very stressful period,” she says. Long walks with the dogs helped her relax her mind then – and still do now.
As Janauer describes it, during this period she worked whenever the children were asleep. “At the beginning of maternity leave I didn’t even enjoy it, the child is just sleeping all the time and I was wondering what on earth I was going to do? That’s two hours after lunch, then in the evening from eight until midnight. In six hours a day, you can get a lot done. But I know that many women simply can’t manage it because of the children, I was just very motivated,” she says.
According to Janauer, building a business without industry contacts was even more demanding. “I was missing people with whom I could discuss problems and get advice,” she admits. After two years of business, she attended the Reshoper conference and trade fair for the first time. “It was great to hear from others that they were dealing with the same things. And gradually I built friendships; we always advise each other. It’s important to have support in stressful situations.”
In fact, the amount of stress recently led Janauer to decide that she would simply sell the whole company. “Crisis, children, mistakes, stress, exhaustion… I just wanted to get rid of it. I even found a buyer, although it turned out that the terms offered were very unfavorable,” she explains, adding that her investors had a right of first refusal on the shares. And neither of them wanted her to leave the company.
Matěj Turek again stepped in, buying another 29 percent stake, so Janauer herself now holds only a minority share of the company. “It was a concession so I could stay. Now I have significantly less stress, more money in the account, and I can enjoy life more,” she says. Monkey Mum’s business is doing well – last year it reached revenues of 33 million crowns and this year it is heading toward fifty million. It has also moved out of the red.
As part of its portfolio, it now offers not just bed guards, but a wider range of products for mothers, children, and young families, including travel items and toys. It sells all of this in various European countries, but about 70 percent of revenue comes from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, and Spain. The e-shop now wants to focus more on the potential in these countries; on the other hand, it is scaling back its activities in less profitable markets such as Greece, where it had to struggle even more with transport to the islands, as well as Scandinavia and the Baltics.
The long-term vision is not to build Monkey Mum into just an ordinary e-shop, but into an entire community of mothers with children. “When we were in a toy store once, they told the children they weren’t allowed to play there. But where else should they play?” Janauer asks. So the plan for the future is clear: “It’s not possible to compete with others on price. But it is possible through the experience.”
Write a comment
This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.