Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month

Looks like there are about 10m women staying at home with kids - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/number-of-stay-at-home...

I wonder how many of them doing such businesses, and how many could engage in such businesses, and if they do not want to do it - why.

Revenues are irrelevant. Profits aren't.

I run an almost identical fabric shop online. 20k/month revenue is great but remember this is not a SaaS with unlimited scale and low costs. It's actually a very traditional business model, and margins here are only going to about 20-30%, potentially a lot less if you have to pay for your storage space.

You buy the fabric, typically you'll double the price when selling to customers. Then you take off additional postage fees/packaging (note the flat fees on postage), payment fees (3-4%), discounts, returns, shopify monthly fees, accounting software etc.

You'll spend about 50% of your day cutting & packing orders, taking them to the post office etc. (or you can employ someone to help) and the rest of the time taking shots for instagram, sourcing new suppliers, working on SEO/blogging and doing admin.

If you're good at marketing you can shift quite a lot of fabric, but it will take you about a year to get your stock levels up to a sustainable amount to pay yourself a wage. If you want a real shop front you will generate most of your profit from running classes as the costs for a high street store are significantly higher than shopify and you gain little in terms of footfall vs online traffic.

This isn't a get rich quick model but over time it works well and is replicable at scale.

Depends on scale and runway. If you have 200k/month in revenue you can easily make (or lose) a boat load of money with a few small adjustments to your margins.

Is using a year long maternity leave to start a business an argument for extended maternity leaves?