A West Valley City woman’s entrepreneurial dream has earned her some cash to help carry it out. 

Anna Robbins-Ek recently won $500 as one of five winners of the inaugural Get Started: Business Idea Competition held by the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity’s Startup State Initiative.

The money will help Robbins-Ek, who runs two nonprofit day care centers, The Mom Pod Co in Taylorsville and Salt Lake City, start an online used-clothing exchange that enables parents and others to buy and sell previously owned apparel for children of all ages. 

“One of the things we always go through with kids is clothes,” she said. “So I started Kiddie Klosets.” 

The typical way for parents to keep their fast-growing children clothed had been, and still is to a large degree, to receive hand-me-downs from family and friends or sift through thrift stores. Like many other shopping options, Kiddie Klosets takes that process online. “Parents can take a picture of their clothes and we upload them onto our website and you can trade and swap clothes wherever you are,” Robbins-Ek explained. Parents can also browse the website and purchase clothes from the sellers, who would then ship the items to the buyers. 

Another plan under development with Kiddie Klosets are swap stations where people can sign up for their homes to be swap stations where folks can drop off unneeded children’s clothes and those hosting the swap stations can do the work of putting the items for sale on the website. 

“Because it is all online, I can go all across the U.S…and hopefully get moms from all over swapping their kids’ clothes and also saving the environment and making things more affordable.”

Robbins-Ek said the competition judged the budding entrepreneurs’ business propositions on viability, income, growth projections and prospects for achieving goals and milestones. Kiddie Klosets’ source of revenue will be from subscriptions that are priced based on the volume of clothes subscribers want to sell.

She acknowledges the $500 award isn’t huge, but will definitely help- in this case, it will allow her to complete the building of a website that will essentially be the storefront of Kiddie Klosets. “They (the competition organizers) wanted it to be something that when we got the money, it would actually propel the business forward.”

“With Kiddie Klosets, I’ve just been waiting to have the extra funds to be able to launch the website because that’s going to change the business,” Robbins-Ek said. “Now I can turn my dream into an actual reality.” 

The full website, kiddieklosets.com, should be up and running in April. λ