Good ideas often begin at home. Addie Swartz launched her entrepreneurial career at age 12 with an apple-pie business in the family kitchen in New Jersey. Her father closed that business down because Addie was monopolizing the oven. But a career path—one that would be furthered at Stanford and then Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management—was established.
Swartz blazed through executive jobs at Disney, General Foods, Rockport shoes and Lotus. On maternity leave from Lotus 15 years ago, she decided to go out on her own, drafting a small army of moms to sell children’s software at Tupperware-style house parties. The concept exploded, taking Swartz’s little empire to 33 states. In a burst of prescience, she sold out just before software piracy made her idea unprofitable.
When she geared up for her next venture, Swartz once again looked toward home. Swartz believed that little girls should be free to be little girls. But before her very eyes, her daughter Aliza was turning into something closer to a young woman—at age 8. Fashion for Aliza and her friends was all about navels and nail polish. They were plotting their futures in show business. They were preoccupied with boys.
“I saw my child being bombarded with stuff that I thought was totally inappropriate,” Swartz said. “The messages that were out there for Aliza and her friends were overly sexual and demeaning.”
So as a businesswoman and as a mother, Swartz decided to do something. She admired the business model created by Pleasant Rowland, who founded the American Girl series of dolls, books and products. Swartz decided to aim for a slightly older audience—the “tween” market of about 11 million 9- to 13-year-old girls.
In 2002, she launched B*Tween Productions. It took two years to work out the plot lines for what has grown to an eight-volume series of Beacon Street Girls novels (a ninth is due shortly). Swartz—who lives in Concord, west of Boston—created stories involving five girls in a Boston suburb. To engage young readers, entire sections of the books are written in instant-message format or as diary entries. The stories deal with everything from jealousy to competition to divorce—and, of course, shopping.
More than 100,000 copies of the BSG books have been sold, along with the accompanying line of purses, trinkets and other products, which enable her to market the BSG line more broadly than in bookstores alone. Mostly, Swartz says she wanted to devise a small universe to help girls like her own two daughters treasure the fleeting moments of childhood.
