At 16, She Was a Homeless Single Mom With Serious Talent. Now, Her Business Brings in Millions. Mimi G. Ford's online venture was earning seven figures within just three years. Today, she's excited to reach even more people.
By Amanda Breen Edited by Jessica Thomas
Key Takeaways
- Mimi G. Ford was a single mother of three in her 20s struggling to make ends meet.
- She returned to her sewing passion in 2008, starting a blog to share her pieces.
- By 2012, she took her course-creation venture full-time and never looked back.
Mimi G. Ford, founder of online sewing school SewItAcademy.com, developed her love of sewing as a child visiting her dad in Puerto Rico every summer. She would watch, mesmerized, as her seamstress aunt transformed "yards of fabric into gorgeous dresses." Ford started using the scraps to sew clothes for her Barbie dolls by hand.
Ford's father gifted her a sewing machine, and she was 12 when she began to teach herself how to sew. "I would take apart clothing I already had," she tells BIZ Experiences, "trace around the pieces, and then sew them back together, which is how I learned construction and patternmaking."
But a series of traumatic events in her early life caused her to set her passion aside.
After she was abused by two family members, Ford ran away from home at 15, became a teen mom and experienced homelessness in Los Angeles. By the time she was in her mid-20s, Ford had three children and worked full-time as a receptionist, but it was still hard to make ends meet.
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"That was the birth of my very first step-by-step video tutorial."
In 2008, Ford found her way back to her love of sewing. She started a blog, still a "relatively new" concept at the time, where she shared pieces she made for herself. At that point, she only posted occasionally — but that would change in 2010.
"I made a skirt for myself that people loved, and I posted it on my blog," Ford says. "I got a lot of requests to buy that skirt, but I didn't sew for hire and still don't. However, things got tight near the holidays, and I decided to take a few orders for the skirt."
Ford set a high price and figured only "one or two people would bite." She added a Paypal button to her account, and the next morning, she "woke up to thousands of dollars in [her] account." Ford sewed dozens of skirts over the weeks that followed to fulfill the orders, "hating every minute of it." The most logical next step was to teach people how to sew the garments themselves.
"That was the birth of my very first step-by-step video tutorial," Ford says. "I had done numerous free videos until then, but this became my first digital product." Ford chalks up some of her success to a "mix of the right time with right idea," as the marketplace for online courses wasn't as saturated as it is now.
By 2012, Ford was earning more money selling digital courses than she was at her other job, so she quit and became a full-time content creator and teacher. Her venture continued to grow, so she founded Mimi G Style, Inc. and "poured all [her] energy" into creating content, blogging and selling courses.
"I used YouTube as a marketing device to drive customers to my site," she says. "That same year, I signed my first licensing agreement to design my own sewing patterns for Simplicity, and that put me in front of an even greater audience and got me into big box stores like Walmart, Joann Fabrics and Hobby Lobby."
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"I wanted this to be accessible to most people."
Four years later, Ford "was making more money than ever" and decided to invest all of it back into her business. She launched an online fashion sewing and design school "to teach people how to sew using a curriculum that was easy to understand, fun to watch and, above all, fashionable."
"People who followed me wanted to learn how to design and make clothes they wanted to wear," Ford explains. "They wanted to learn sewing, patternmaking and fashion illustration, and Sew It Academy provided all that. It's expensive to go to fashion design school, and I wanted this to be accessible to most people, so I built it as a membership site, which allowed me to keep it affordable."
Within one year, Ford had thousands of students, and within three, Sew It Academy was raking in seven figures. Today, her school boasts more than 80,000 enrolled students. She's since started a sister patternmaking academy; opened an Atlanta-based fabric store; founded a consulting business; written a book; and even designed and launched her very own Mimi G Iron.
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"I signed on as vice president and brand manager for the company who first licensed me as a pattern designer," she adds, "and I founded a new line of sewing patterns designed by makers in the sewing community, giving them the opportunity I was given when I started with Simplicity."
Many of Ford's students have gone on to become designers themselves, and she looks forward to reaching even more people with an interest in the craft.
"My students vary in age from 9 to over 80 and everything in between," Ford says. "Every gender, size and shape! This is not something 'some' people are doing; this is something everyone wants to do. It has given me an even greater opportunity to keep building, growing and creating new opportunities for up-and-coming content creators and designers."
