Meet Jaime Miller + Sarah Louderback | Co-founders + mamas

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jaime Miller + Sarah Louderback and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jaime Miller + Sarah Louderback, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
We both have worked corporate jobs our whole lives and when we had our first babies we fell in love with the parenting community + the fashion! My cousin Sarah, created a Diaper Emergency Kit as our first product. It contained all diaper essentials that you could stash in your car in case you had an emergency and no supplies. From there, we decided we wanted to evolve Spilled Milk into something bigger and focus on creating a curated assortment of clothing + accessories for babies and toddlers based on brands we love for our own kids.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
We are a family-owned business. Sarah is my cousin and our moms may have planted the fashion seed at an early age because they were always dressing us up as kids, complete with giant bows in our hair. I have spent the last 15+ years in the apparel industry working for premium denim brands. I have always loved denim + all things vintage! Sarah and I worked at Levi’s together for a period of time. I was the merchant and she worked in sales + inventory forecasting, so we have always maintained a good balance of creative + financial backgrounds. Once we both started having kids, we fell in love with all of the amazing brands within the baby + kids space and felt like we could start something ourselves to showcase and highlight these brands. It has not been easy, haha! I think we were able to overcome our challenges through a lot of trial and error. An unofficial tagline for our brand is “perfectly imperfect”. And that is what we go back to whenever something doesn’t turn out the way we thought it was going too. Both professionally and personally.

Some of the lessons that we have learned along the way include quality over quantity when it comes to product. We buy brands that we put our own kids in and feel good about. Facebook ads do work! If you are a small business trying to drive brand awareness and traffic back to your site, this has been a large contributing factor to our success. Branded content creation has also been the focus of our marketing strategy this year. We both have two kids, so it’s been fun and easy to throw the samples on them to show how to style + wear some of our key items we are investing in. And lastly our customers! We also try to have the mindset that we are our target customer. So everything we do is through that lens. Would we buy that? How often would our kids wear it? Would we spend that much? Customer service + experience is the most important thing to us, because without customers we would have no business!

We have only been doing this for a year now and it’s incredible how much we have learned in that short amount of time! We are excited to fine tune our product assortment this year and continue finding new and exciting brands to carry in our online shop. We hope to be able to pop-up in more locations as we’d love to start meeting people in-person. We feel very lucky + grateful to be doing something that we love every day.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I am based out of the Newport Beach/Costa Mesa area. Here are some of my local faves! We would start out the day with KIT coffee, followed by breakfast at Haute Cakes Caffe, such a cute indoor/outdoor space and the food is delicious. After that I would drive them over to do a little homegoods shopping at Juxtaposition. Would be an absolute dream to open a brick & mortar location nextdoor to them. After that we would grab some baguette sandwiches (and some wine) and head over to Pacific Electric Boat Rentals for a duffy boat ride around the harbor. I feel like this is the best way to view some of the most beautiful homes in the area and it’s fun for kids too! For dinner, I would take them (sans kids) to Laguna Beach to eat at AhbA followed by a drink nextdoor at Helen’s, the coolest speakeasy. Some of my other favorite places to eat + shop include, Oliver’s Osteria, Broadway, South of Nick’s, Selanne, Good Together House, Laguna Supply + Store. Sarah is based in Marin, so she can give all the north bay area recs!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
We would love to dedicate our shoutout to the social parenting + mom community! It is a really special community to be a part of and we find a lot of joy and inspiration daily from it. So many of these moms are incredibly talented and creative, all while raising their families. It’s nice to be a part of something where we share a lot of common interests including cute clothing for our kids. And we know it’s not always rainbows + sunshine, there are a lot of people and parents going through it out there and if we can help brighten someone’s day, that makes our hearts happy!

Website: www.getspilledmilk.com

Instagram: @getspilledmilk

Other: email: hello@getspilledmilk.com

Image Credits
Spilled Milk