( Mental Floss ) -- With Mother 's Day just around the corner , this week seemed like a great time to give a tip of our caps to stay-at-home moms , including these four who used clever ideas to become business moguls . Gerber : Of course only a mother could found such a successful baby food company ! In the late 1920s , Michigan mom Dorothy S. Gerber was hand-straining food for her baby daughter , Sally , when she realized there must be some way to avoid the messy task . She pointed out to her husband , Daniel , that if his family 's business , the Fremont Canning Company , could puree a tomato all day long , its equipment could probably make short work of other fruits and veggies , too . Daniel Gerber realized his wife was on to something , and after a year of experimentation -- and an extensive search to find the right drawing for their label 's now-iconic `` Gerber baby '' - the Gerbers introduced their first line of baby foods , a super-yummy menu of strained peas , carrots , prunes , and spinach . Mental Floss : 6 unforgettable movie mothers . Baby Einstein : When Alpharetta , Georgia mom Julie Aigner-Clark went looking for educational materials for her newborn daughter in 1996 , she found a disappointing hole in the baby market : there were n't really any educational materials to expose babies to music and the arts . Some parents would just accept whatever the market was offering . Not Aigner-Clark . She shot a video for her daughter in her basement then edited it with her husband , Bill , on the family computer . She even doodled a logo for the video at her kitchen table . Within a year , the first Baby Einstein video was in stores , and the series quickly became a runaway hit . Disney bought the company in 2001 after Baby Einstein raked in $ 12 million in revenue the previous year . After the sale Aigner-Clark gave an interview to The New York Times in which she sounded a little surprised by her huge windfall . `` I was just a stay-at-home mom who wanted to expose my daughter to classical music , poetry , not a budding entrepreneur . '' Mental Floss : 6 other animals dogs will adopt . Mrs. Fields : Debbi Fields was a young stay-at-home mom when she started to feel restless in 1977 . She had always loved baking cookies , so she figured she might try her hand at opening a cookie store . The concept does n't sound odd now that there 's seemingly a Mrs. Fields outlet in every mall you walk into , but at the time the notion that a store would only sell cookies seemed absurd . Furthermore , Fields was only 20 years old and did n't have any business experience . Fields nevertheless managed to secure financing for her venture and she opened up her first cookie shop in Palo Alto , California . Fields and her husband , Randall , soon confirmed their suspicions that people really enjoy cookies and will gladly drop a few bucks to get a warm one . The company began a sweeping franchising program , and in the 1993 Fields sold her cookie empire to an investment firm . Mental Floss : People who switched careers after 50 ( and thrived ) BabyLegs : Put this one on the list of brilliant niche markets we did n't know existed : baby legwarmers . Nicole Donnelly managed to turn that very idea into a fabulously successful company . In April 2005 Donnelly found a new weapon in her ongoing battle with her daughter 's diaper rashes . By letting her daughter enjoy some of what they called `` nakedy butt time , '' the rash got some much-needed fresh air , but the tot 's legs got cold . Donnelly combatted this chilliness by cutting up a pair of socks to make improvised baby legwarmers . Donnelly quickly realized that the legwarmers had all sorts of side benefits . They did more than just keep her daughter 's legs toasty ; they also protected the baby 's legs when she crawled and made changing diapers a breeze . Donnelly whipped up some stylish designs and began selling BabyLegs to other moms . BabyLegs proved to be an incredibly lucrative idea . In 2008 the company moved over $ 4 million worth of its legwarmers worldwide , and in April 2009 United Legwear bought a majority stake in the company and began aggressively expanding the company 's reach . Mental Floss : Where do baby carrots come from ? For more mental_floss articles , visit mentalfloss.com . Entire contents of this article copyright , Mental Floss LLC . All rights reserved .
Four stay-at-home moms used clever ideas to become business moguls . Michigan mom Dorothy Gerber went from making her baby 's food to starting a company . Baby Einstein began because music and arts educational materials did n't exist for babies . Trying to her baby 's legs warm , led Nicole Donnelly to start a company .