After my previous post, yet another successful, entrepreneur mother to post about!

Forget-Me-Not Cards, Switzerland was founded in 2005 by British woman, Liz Andrews, who having found herself a new stay at home Mum, wanted something to fill the time as her toddlers became more independent.  An eternal lover and giver of greetings cards, she found the cards in the Swiss shops to have little variety, extremely expensive and not actually very appealing – as well as the availability of English cards being rather hard to find.  This gave her the idea of importing cards from the UK – and the life of her card business began with a couple of baskets of cards being sold within playgroup circles.  During the past four years, it’s expanded to taking over a room within her house at Chamby-sur-Montreux (two rooms during the busy Christmas period!) and The Card Room at Chamby is open all hours by prior appointment (see contact details at the end of the post).

There are thousands of cards on display for all occasions from regular greetings cards to bespoke hand-crafted varieties covering from new baby congratulations to engagement, marriage, new home, get well, condolence and all family birthdays as well as ages from 1 to 100.  Additionally small gifts are on sale too, e.g. bookmarks, candles, phone charms, magnets, notelets, etc.  Cards start at just Fr 1 – most are priced at Fr 3, whilst the hand-crafted styles are from Fr 4 to Fr 5.50 – generally about half the price of those sold in department stores and card shops.  Liz also provides a mobile delivery service to your home, office or school (between Lausanne & Aigle).  Just let her know which type of cards you’re in need of, and she can bring the appropriate selection to you to choose from.

Liz has recently expanded her business to include Phoenix Cards and has become an independent Phoenix trader.  Cards, giftwrap, postcards, stationery and accessories can be ordered from a catalogue which you can browse from home and orders placed via Liz.  There are over 800 contemporary designs to choose from, all blank inside and therefore suitable for all occasions.

Cards can be ordered online at  www.phoenix-trading.eu/web/lizandrews

Regular coffee mornings and cheese & wine evenings are held at Liz’s home with other artisans selling items such as British Food items, hand-crafted beaded jewellery, English children’s books, educational wooden toys, home-made conserves, etc.  To be included on the mailing list for these events, feel free to email Liz to have your name added.

Additionally, Forget-Me-Not can come to host a card party for you and your friends at your place. As a hostess, you can benefit from a 25% reduction on all your purchases if you arrange to have a minimum of 6 friends come along to socialise, browse, and buy at your home.

For more information, please contact:

Liz Andrews
Forget-Me-Not Cards
Route de Chaulin 74B, 1832 Chamby
(3 mins by car from Montreux autoroute exit)
Email: ForgetMeNotCards(AT)bluewin.ch
www.phoenix-trading.eu/web/lizandrews
Tel:  021 964 5091 / 079 376 3079

Tweet This Post

As always, I got excited whenever I learned about a successful expat Lausanne mom, especially when the business is very family-oriented.

Carmen and her gorgeous children

Carmen Sanchez-Cuenca comes from Spain and enjoys a multicultural family. She’s married to a Belgian and her three children were born in Mexico (where they lived for 8 years until they moved to Lausanne in 2003). Trained and worked as an international journalist, upon arriving in Switzerland, Carmen decided to change her profession and started studying child psychology. She later moved to Coaching, which she thought was more suited to her practical and optimistic personality. She founded BYouCoaching, offering many different kinds of workshops for parents or children in English, French or Spanish. For example, she coaches moms who would like to balance family and professional life, or want to go back to work after a break to take care of their children (or after moving abroad) and need support. The themes of the workshops range from Emotional intelligence, Solving conflicts in the family, Communication, Getting the children to cooperate and Coherent discipline to Coaching your own children.

Carmen is also trained for STEP workshops, a very well known parenting approach in the USA. While she also organizes conferences with big audiences for parents associations, she still prefers smaller groups of 6 to 10 people. The workshops can take place in her office or another place, for example during a private afternoon coffee.

For more information of her service, please contact Carmen at:

BYouCoaching
Carnen Sanchez-Cuenca
ICF Certified Family and Career Coach
Carmen(AT)byoucoaching.com
http://www.byoucoaching.com/
Tel. 0788303931

Tweet This Post

I bet you’d been in one of those situations when you needed someone to help you with a simple (sometimes silly) task that you just couldn’t manage since you didn’t speak French. I’m fortunate to have many French-speaking colleagues who are always happy to help with translation or making a call, but for things that I prefer to do “privately”, most of the time I feel helpless.

So imagine how happy I was to learn about the service offered by Béatrice Reid. Béatrice comes from France (born in Nantes) and is a qualified freelance translator (MA in Bilingual Translation English-French). She worked in London for 10 years and in New York for 3 years. She and her husband moved to Vaud in 2008. Béatrice offers help to do your daily tasks, whether to fill in some forms on your behalf, to write to your French correspondence, to make phone calls or appointments with local businesses. She can also translate any type of document, from your rental agreement to letters to CVs.

Béatrice can be very flexible with the assignments she works on. This also allows her to build a personal and strong working relationship with her clients and customize her services to their needs for each assignment. She provides a fast, professional and reasonably priced service. Typically, her mimimum fee is 20CHF (for instance, for a phone call or a follow up with a translation in English). Otherwise, depending on the assignment, it’s charged by the hour: 35CHF/hour for ‘bilingual assistance’ (such as to accompany somebody to a meeting, organise a house search, do the paperwork to declare the cleaner or babysitter to the AVS or Chèque-emploi, etc.)

For more information, you can contact Béatrice at:

Béatrice Reid
Traductions / Assistance bilingue
Ch. des Curzilles, 14
1170 Aubonne
Tel. 079 532 72 47
beatrice_reid(AT)hotmail.com

Tweet This Post

Update: The presentation is re-scheduled to Tuesday, March 2 at 7pm

Anna from Books Books Books just shared a great event for us ladies. Marwa Shehata, who is an HR Senior Consultant and Facilitator, will be holding a FREE interactive workshop on women entrepreneurs on Tuesday, February 23 at 7pm at the bookstore. She will be discussing the book Womenomics by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay.

If you’re on facebook, RSVP on Books Books Books event page (click here).

Tweet This Post

Ah, I’m always so happy posting about a successful mom, especially if the mom is a Lausanne Mom! Some of you may already knew Clare Kutschera, a WAHM working as an Organiser for Usborne Books at Home. As I know that many stay-at-home moms would like to get their own income, I thought it would be great to share Clare’s success story, especially since it involves Usborne. I bet that all of you have at least one Usborne book at home. It’s just so ubiquitous!

Hi Clare, thanks so much for the possibility to post about you and your job selling the Usborne Book.

Let start with sharing a bit about your background to the readers. Where do you come from and what brought you to Lausanne?

Hi, I am British and came to Switzerland just over 5 years ago.  Like many people I came because of my husband’s work.  Originally it was just for 3 months, but his contract kept being extended, until we had been here long enough that when his contract came to an end, we decided to stay for good and he is now a freelance consultant.

I read in your website that you chanced upon becoming an Usborne book organizer after seeing an ad in their catalog. How did it go? How long was it until you started selling the books?

I emailed Sally, the lady who had placed the ad, and within a couple of days my form was sent off, and my starter pack was on its way.  The usual price for the starter pack is £38 (about 64CHF) although they often have special offers (e.g. this month it is £20.10).  For this I received over £100 of books and stationary, which arrived about 10 days later.

A friend had offered to host a party at her house, so I was on my way very quickly!

What do you love the most about your job?

The flexibility.  I have a 5 year old son and have been doing this since he was little.  He can come with me to parties and sales, and as I set my own hours I really can fit it in around him.

There are also no compulsory targets, apart from having to submit £100 worth of orders within the first 12 weeks (which is very easy to do!) so if for some reason I need to take any time off I can do so without being penalised.

Having said that, Usborne do provide plenty of incentives.  Several organisers just won a trip to Hong Kong and the next big incentive is a trip to Iceland.

Wow! Sounds awesome!
Now that you’re doing really well with the selling job, would you still consider changing to another job?

I never say never!  However this is one of the great things about Usborne.  As long as it is not with a similar business, you are welcome to have other jobs too.  Lots of organisers have part or full time jobs and fit Usborne around them.  Some organisers only join up to get cheap books for their children, or to provide books for their child’s school.

What advice can you share to the readers, if after reading this, some would like to become an organizer for Usborne book like you?

Contact me for a chat, or have a look on my website.

I am expecting my second child in May, and so I am keen to have someone else on my team that I can hand my contacts over to (so you really would have a ready made business!) while I have a break but still provide a service to my customers.

You can join through any organiser, but if you join through me, you would have some local experience to draw on, and as I say, I have plenty of contacts, including schools and nurseries that I am happy to share to get you going!

Thank you, Clare. I wish you all the best for your career and the new baby. I hope you’ll have more moms joining you as organisers!

To contact Clare, visit her website.

Tweet This Post

The annual Journée “Oser tous les métiers!” (I loosely translated it into “Bring Your Children to Work” Day) for the Canton of Vaud will come in 2 weeks — Thursday, November 12.

This event targets 5th-7th graders, and is done by having the girls going with theirs fathers to work and boys with their mothers. The idea is to introduce jobs that are men-dominated to the girls and that are currently considered feminine to the boys. So hopefully one day we will have gender equity at most (if not all) types of work. If the parents cannot do it, or if the kids have known the work, they can also come with a close relative (uncle, aunt, grandparents).

I know that we will have it in the hospital where I work, as well as in UNIL and CHUV. So in case your company’s public relation officer hasn’t said anything about it, perhaps you can let them know that you’ re interested to bring your child to work that day?

For more information, this is the official website.

*Image courtesy of melyviz, used under Creative Common License

Tweet This Post

I would like to have a general view of my readers and very much like to have you vote on my polls. There will be some more polls coming. Please vote only once and only if you are a mom residing in Switzerland. Thank you!

[POLLIN 2]

Tweet This Post

I always admire entrepreneurs. Always – no matter how small (or big) the business is. This is the reason behind my decision to add another category to this blog: “Mommy Entrepreneur”, so that I can share the inspiring stories of non-Swiss moms who run their own business in Switzerland. As the premier post, here is the story of Jessica Marti, the owner of the Etsy store “Belles Mademoiselles”, in her own words.

Hello fellow English speakers of Switzerland.  My name is Jessica Marti, I am married and have two daughters; Rachel who is 6 years old, and Elodie who is three. My girls are the inspiration behind all of the items I create and sell. I have been involved in arts and crafts in one way or another for as long as I can remember. Although it wasn’t until six years ago with the birth if my first daughter that I started sewing.  It all came about because I wanted a handmade one of a kind baby blanket, and I didn’t know anybody who could do it, so I bought a sewing machine and gave it a try. I was hooked, it felt so good creating things I could use for my baby that nobody else had. I then started making things I really couldn’t use, and needless to say stuff started piling up. My next logical step was to start selling my things, so I turned to ebay which I was quite successful with for a while…

We moved from Los Angeles California USA to La Neuveville Switzerland in Nov 07. Wow what a change!!! All my designing and creating was put on hold until we got settled. Now I am back into the swing of things again, and I have opened up a little online shop on Etsy called Belles Mademoiselles.  It is named after my girls of course. After we came here many people would say look at the “belles mademoiselles” in French of course, but you get the picture. Now I design and make clothing and accessories for girls. As well as tote bags, and originally designed over the shoulder bags for women.

I love making clothing and accessories for my girls, and I think they like it too. They pick the fabric they like, and tell me for example, I would like a skirt, or that would be a cute headband. That’s how many of my items end up in my shop. It’s so satisfying to see them in something I have made for them, and they like wearing something they helped create.

Everything featured in my shop has been first created for me or my girls before it’s listed for sale. So I know how it will hold up to severe treatment, and washing etc. I would never try to sell anything I wouldn’t use for my girls or myself.

Thank you for taking the time to read about me, and if you are interested in my unique handmade clothing or accessories for girls, or perhaps something unique for yourself. Please have a look at my shop at BellesMademoiselles.etsy.com. If you decide to purchase enter coupon code LMB in notes to seller at checkout, and save 15% off your entire purchase. Or if you don’t have an etsy account you can still see my shop, and contact me through email at Bellesmademoiselles(AT)yahoo.com. I also make travel pillows and small pillows for children not listed in my shop. Thank you again and I hope to hear from you soon.

Thank you, Jessica, for sharing and for the coupon code! I’m a big Etsy fan and totally tempted by the coupon code!

And, psssst, for those of you who want to read more of Jessica’s crafty stories, don’t forget to visit her blog!

*Pictures courtesy of Jessica Marti & Belles Mademoiselles

Tweet This Post

Sometime ago I blogged that I asked the hospital where I work for a nursing room. Now I will tell you what happened (sorry this update took so long after the original post):

Within 2 days I was told that I could use one of the meeting rooms in the hospital. It’s not ideal since sometimes the room was occupied but it was already better than pumping milk in the toilet. But after several days the human resource manager told me that there were 2 rooms that would be more suitable for me. These rooms are located within the children facility of the hospital (i.e. where they teach blind children many important skills). They are in fact bedrooms — with beds, desks, and sinks. I was given a key that was used only by me (and another nursing mom who works in the same lab as I do) and it was just perfect. I can go there at any convenient time, lock the door, and express my milk in tranquility, knowing that no one will bother me there.

Based on this and some other experience, I found that people were very friendly and helpful when it comes to baby’s and mom’s need. I don’t get the feeling that it was just because the law was on my side. I also realized that many workplace don’t have nursing room since most working mothers in Switzerland can take maternity leave for many months, so that when they return to work, the babies have started solid food, and they either change the breast milk to formula or nurse only in the morning and after coming back from work. But, in case you’re like me, want to nurse longer and maximize giving breast milk to your baby, I encourage you to ask for such room. And I hope you will have such good response like I had.

*Many thanks for Mme. De Allegri, who helped me to get the nursing room

*Picture courtesy of gregoryjameswalsh, used under Creative Common License

Tweet This Post

I finally returned to work 2 weeks ago. As I still breastfeed my baby and would like to continue until she’s 1 y.o., I have to express my breast milk at work. Unfortunately, the hospital where I work does not have a special room designated for nursing mother, even though it is compulsory by law. I asked the human resource officer and she told me that I was the first person to ask for such a room. She promised to forward my request to the person in charge for this.

So now I’m waiting for the good news. In the meanwhile, I express the milk in a meeting room that is rarely used. Once, though, I had to express in the toilet as that room was used. And I hated it. I just hate to prepare my baby’s food in the toilet. It feels so unhygienic and also as the result of my un-easy-ness, I got less milk in twice as much time as when I pump in the meeting room. Oh, I hope the hospital takes the request seriously and I can express my milk in a comfortable surrounding.

I would really love to hear from the other working mothers in Lausanne or other cities in Switzerland. Does your place of work provide such facility? Have you ever asked for one? Was it granted? I know from Claudia, who works at Philip Morris in Lausanne that they have such room there. Well, they even have their own nursery, so a room should not be a problem for such a big company, I guess. How about those of you working for smaller companies? Please share your experience, if any.

Tweet This Post