Widowed mum makes $2 million in a year to raise her two kids alone

After a tragic accident, this Queenslander took a $300,000 gamble so that she could afford to raise her two kids. And eventually it paid off, big time.

A Queensland single mum has made nearly $2 million in the past year after her small business soared to new heights against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Carol Brunswick, from Woombye in the Sunshine Coast, has just opened up a multimillion-dollar factory for her business, called Belly Bands, after the record year.

As the business name suggests, the entrepreneur sells TGA-approved bands that wrap around a pregnant woman’s belly, providing support and reducing pain.

“A belly band isn’t a new concept, I didn’t invent, it’s been around for centuries. But it’s our modern take on that,” Ms Brunswick told news.com.au.

With people putting off physiotherapist sessions during the many coronavirus lockdowns, Ms Brunswick noticed an increased in demand for her products.

Ms Brunswick, 51, was forced to become a small business owner because of a tragic accident.

In September 2010, her husband died suddenly in a workplace incident at the mines, leaving her with two kids to raise by herself.

“I wasn’t the main breadwinner,” she said. “Straight away I was thinking, what am I going to do?”

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Carol Brunswick and her children Calum and Sandie, aged 16 and 27.

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Ms Brunswick’s two children, Sandie and Calum, were 16 and four years old when their father passed away.

She was only working part-time in IT, which didn’t pay enough to support her family.

Back then, working from home wasn’t an option. She needed to be in the office for work and was required to travel.

So she decided to quit and become the Australian distributor of a US woman’s business selling pregnancy support bands.

Although the bands Ms Brunswick was selling were “lovely and soft” cotton, they didn’t provide much in the way of support.

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Carol used to work part-time in IT.

Belly Bands has been around for five years.

Her US boss also sourced products from a factory in China, which meant there was little consistency in sizes.

“A medium size was three or four different sizes,” Ms Brunswick recalled.

She spent most of her time giving out refunds and responding to customer complaints about the faulty products.

“I was basically making no money, I was putting more money in,” she said.

For three years, she spent her life savings — $300,000 — trying to get the business off the ground in Australia, but it all went into a black hole.

She eventually quit. The business has since shut down.

Ms Brunswick was ready to give up, but then she got a knock on the door.

“A gentleman turned up at my door, asking if I had anything for his wife who had just gone through surgery (a C-section),” she explained.

Ms Brunswick’s daughter Sandie used a belly band while she was pregnant last year.

Ms Brunswick’s teenage son named the company.

Not wanting to turn him away, Ms Brunswick decided to create her own belly band to give to the man’s wife.

“I made her something in a design that I thought it would work,” she said.

She used an elastic material rather than cotton, and made it adjustable, because she didn’t know it was the woman’s exact size.

It was a huge success.

The woman “told me a story of the pain and how much it had helped”, according to Ms Brunswick.

“Then she told someone else. Then they told something else.”

She realised there was still demand for the product.

“Because I had that experience with that other brand, I was able to take all of that and run with it,” she said.

Ms Brunswick and her two kids helped her make the bands in their basement “well into the night”.

The family together with Sandie’s new baby.

The company has four brick-and-mortar stores.

Her son came up with the name “Belly Bands” and in October 2016, she built her own website.

To get the business off the ground, “I had to take a very high interest loan of $5000, because I’d spent everything”.

Since then, she has sold 60,000 belly bands to date, 200 physiotherapists stock her products at their practices and it has four brick-and-mortar stores, as well as the ability to post products around the country.

The products have been approved by the TGA, so customers can claim it back on their health funds.

There are 10 full-time employees that work under her – one of which is her daughter Sandie, now aged 27, who works as a the general manager.

Sandie was recently pregnant and used the belly band during the whole process.

Ms Brunswick forked out $1.7 million in March to begin constructing a factory in Chevallum on the Sunshine Coast.

She expects it to take around six months to be fully-built.

When it’s completed, they’ll hire another 10 people to work in the factory, essentially doubling their workforce.

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Originally published as Widowed mum makes $2 million in a year to raise her two kids alone