Business & Tech

Business is Booming for Local Stay-at-Home Moms

Daily deal website, Juice in the City, gives Groupon a run for its money—and it's all run by stay-at-home moms.

Daily deal website JuiceInTheCity.com is bringing new meaning to the phrase “stay-at-home mom” for Palo Altans like Kim Robins.

Before the opportunity to be a local business consultant for Juice in the City came around, Robins had been out of the workforce for 12 years. However, thanks to the vision of Juice in the City co-founder Sarah Eisner of Menlo Park, more than 150 stay-at-home moms like Robins—from all across the country—are now making money while still holding on to their stay-at-home status.

“It’s really nice how this job doesn’t get in the way of my ‘mom’ responsibilities,” Robins said.

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What is ‘Juice in the City?’

Daily deals websites are all the rage these days. Chicago-based Groupon was one of the first and has grown by leaps and bounds since its launch. Other sites like Townhog.com, GotDailyDeals.com and San Francisco-based LivingSocial.com have since followed suit.

However, Juice in the City has a unique twist that sets it apart from the rest—the site is run by moms, for moms.

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"We are basically deals, done by and for moms,” Eisner explained. “We do not feature any businesses that local sales moms have not tried, personally. So, the moms source the deals themselves.”

In other words, Juice in the City features deals on the best local businesses on the Peninsula—as well as in 11 other markets across several states—that are targeted toward moms. Think coffee shops, boutiques, summer camps, tickets to children’s shows, yarn stores, spas and more—all mom-tested and pre-approved, and all signed on by stay-at-home moms, whom she calls her “local business consultants,” from Menlo Park, Palo Alto and other surrounding cities.

All of this, and Juice in the City (JITC) has not even celebrated its first birthday yet.

Sarah Eisner, ‘Mom-preneur’

JITC launched in May of last year, on the day after Mother’s Day. A veteran “mom-preneur,” Eisner had just switched gears from running her last successful at-home business, called “Juice Box Jungle”—a weekly online show in which she and a friend discussed mom topics.

“We would take a topic like immunizations, breastfeeding or co-sleeping, and feature different parents' opinions on the topic,” said Eisner.

“Juice Box Jungle” became immensely popular. Regularly, more than 500 mom-bloggers would comment on the show each week, and feature the widget on their sites. Eventually, the show started to bring in serious money through sponsors like cosmetics company Sephora, among others.

It was there that the idea for JITC was born. Eisner said so many of the show’s sponsors wanted to offer their viewers coupons and special deals targeted to moms, that Eisner and her partner got the idea for a mom-centric daily deals site.

The name Juice in the City was a tribute of sorts to Juice Box Jungle.

“Once, Entertainment Weekly referred to ‘Juice Box Jungle’ as ‘Sex and the City’ with kids, because we were kind of snarky and lightly controversial and fun,” Eisner recalled. “And we wanted to keep ‘juice’ in the title, so that’s where the name came from.”

It started out as just Eisner, going around in her local Menlo Park community all on her own, trying to find businesses interested in offering deals on the site. So, she started with the tried and true—the businesses she, as a local mom, loved to frequent.

“I was the first local mom finding the deals. So, I immediately went to two of my favorite places in Menlo Park—, and ” she said.

Today, Borrone and Kepler’s are two of JITC’s most loyal clients. Eisner says they are perfect examples of JITC’s business philosophy—aligning only with mom-friendly, local businesses, and supporting the local economy.

In other words, no huge corporate chains—you won’t be seeing Starbucks on JITC anytime soon.

“We don’t like to do business with huge companies that cannibalize local businesses,” Eisner explained. “By naturally aligning ourselves only with the best local vendors, that draws local bloggers in to talk about the deals.

“You can advertise as much as you want with mediocre deals and pay to get lots and lots of subscribers—and with a lot of subscribers, someone's going to buy—but we'd rather put out a product that people naturally are going to want to talk about.”

Some of JITC’s other popular clients include , in Menlo Park, eyebrow-threading services at Stanford Shopping Center and The Children’s Shop in Menlo Park. Recently, JITC customers practically bought out the entire theater for a show of The Berenstein Bears on stage at the in Redwood City.

Eisner, who took her kids to see the show herself, said it was incredibly gratifying to walk up to the box office at the Fox Theatre and see a line around the block of people waiting to get in with their JITC ticket stubs.

“We [JITC customers] pretty much sold out all 250 seats in the theater,” Eisner said. “It was so personally gratifying to see a whole line of JITC customers outside the theater that night.”

After that night, Eisner decided to conduct a survey of all the JITC customers who had bought tickets to the show through the site, to ask if it had been their first time at the Fox, and whether they would ever return and pay full price for a ticket. Most answered yes, and yes—proving that JITC’s business model indeed has something to it.

“And that's what this whole model is about," Eisner said. "Since we target local moms, our repeat customer rate is fantastic. When moms like a place, they'll go back over and over—and buy for other people, too, not just themselves.”

Palo Alto mom Kim Robins, a local business consultant for JITC, said she appreciates the balance the job helps bring to her life—getting to have a job and make extra money, but also being able to make her own hours and be there for her kids whenever they need her.

“It’s really nice how the job doesn’t get in the way of my ‘mom’ responsibilities,” Robins explained.

Robins has three children who are 8, 10 and 12, so she tries to get all of her work done while they are in school, so she is free to go with them to all of their extra-curricular activities and attend field trips with them.

“They’re all very busy in sports, which takes up a lot of time,” she said. “But they’re all proud that Mom has a job now.”

Robins said she also loves how her job with JITC has given her a new appreciation for her town.

“It’s been nice to get to know so many local business owners, and to get to try out so many new businesses that I’d never been to before,” she said, and added that she especially likes the focus of searching out mom-friendly deals. “It's nice to go to businesses I know my mom friends will like. So, I look for places we would want to go to together, places for lunch or to bring the kids for dinner, and so forth.”

Robins said, the true test of whether to approach a business owner is whether she thinks her friends would like going there.

“If I wouldn't recommend it to my friends, then I know it's probably not a good place for JITC,” she explained. “So, when a business signs on to offer a deal through the site, I can recommend them to my friends, with confidence.”

Menlo Park mom Laura Purpura, a regional manager of JITC local business consultants in the Bay Area, said connecting with other local moms about their favorite places to shop has been one of her favorite aspects of the job. She said she loves it when she’s out and about in the community, and local moms who know she works for JITC approach her to talk about the site’s latest deals.

“They’ll come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I bought this deal,’ and ‘I loved that deal,’ and ask me what deals are coming up, like, ‘Are you going to have any deals on massages for Mother’s Day so I can tell my husband?’ and things like that,” she said. “That’s always fun.”

Purpura said she also appreciates the opportunities JITC gives to stay-at-home moms. Even with such a high position in the company, she said the majority of her job is done from home, in just 25-30 hours of work per week, on average—pretty handy, considering she has four children at home, ranging from preschool to the eighth grade.

“The best part of this job is the flexibility," she said. "I’m able to be there for my kids, which is great,. I love [working for JITC]. The flexibility is perfect for me right now at this point in my life—I’m able to feel like I'm working on my own career, but still able to be there for my kids, as a mom, as well. Because, it's always such a dilemma for moms to choose between their kids and their career. So, it's been really great.”

If you’re a local, stay-at-home mom who would love to make a little extra money in your spare time, Eisner said, JITC is always looking for new local business consultants to join the JITC family. Be sure to check out the website at juiceinthecity.com.


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