The EMPOWER Programme is a Female Entrepreneur Programme targeted at female entrepreneurs from Galway, Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo, Leitrim and Donegal. This programme plans to address specific challenges that hinder females and will help to fast track female-led businesses.
Marina Murphy is a serial entrepreneur having founded two previous businesses and establishing her own restaurant at the youthful age of 24. After the birth of her baby daughter, she had an idea when struggling to change her little baby outdoors without removing all clothing from her baby. The idea for a two-part baby vest was founded. This means you have to just take off the bottom part of the vest (detachable snap buttons) whilst leaving the top part of the vest in place thus keeping your baby nice and warm. She couldn’t get the idea out of her head and found it hard to understand how it wasn’t on the market currently so she started researching it and decided she would bring it to the market. What Marina didn’t realise is that establishing a baby brand is very different from running a restaurant service. Conducting market research, creating designs, working with design teams, manufacturing a prototype, developing a brand, and patenting a product is all a new learning experience and lots of money is needed in the initial stages before you even have a product in your hands. After lots of hard work, the Twosie was launched in July 2019 and will be available in August 2019 online.
When asked how EMPOWER helped her, Marina responded “It influences me greatly, it gave me confidence, support, helped me believed in my business, by believing in me. But most I felt I received from the EMPOWER Programme, is that everyone has a bad day/week/or month, but we always bounce back, and you notice this every month with a different lady and business, and we all help each other out. I always look forward to each monthly session.
For further information on the Twosie check out the BabyBoss website: https://babybossonline.com/
