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CommentsItty-Bitty Pedis
Melanie Hurley was painting her daughter’s nails over a Styrofoam plate one day, when she dripped a little bit of polish. Those drops didn’t just sit there and dry; they bubbled and ate right through the plate. And after painting her daughters’ nails, Hurley would get headaches from the fumes. That’s when Hurley realized that grown-up fingernail polish just wasn’t good enough for teeny tiny toes, and she started to research how to manufacture a safer product. And Piggy Paint was born.
Today, this Cassville resident sells her all-natural, non-toxic, odorless fingernail polish at about 100 stores in seven countries. At press time, Springfield’s Jellybeans kids’ store had picked up the product.
It all started at the ABC Kids Show in Las Vegas, where she first showed off the product last September. “There was an amazing response at the show,” Hurley says. “I knew we had a great idea, but I had no idea how others would react.” Now the company’s online sales are booming, and Hurley says it’s fun to watch orders come in from all over the world as sales grow each week. “In the beginning, we got a big map of the United States and put a sticker everywhere that we got an online order,” she says. “But it got too big for us to keep up.”
Inspired by her own polish-loving daughters, 5-year-old Maddie and 3-year-old Macey, Hurley has come up with 13 bright kid-friendly polish colors, with one more currently in development. “The girls help come up with names for the colors,” she says. Orange is called “Mac-n-Cheese Please.”
So how did Piggy Paint make its way to seven countries in less than a year? Her product has been tested or featured on the websites of many “mommy bloggers,” whom she sent samples for review. “The power of word-of-mouth from mommies is amazing,” Hurley says.
Hurley wasn’t also into the kid-friendly cosmetics business. Before her Styrofoam plate experience, she was a teacher. She grew up in Chilicothe, went to college at Southwest Missouri State, taught second grade in Legrange, Georgia and then taught sixth grade in Rogers, Arkansas before moving to 417-land with her family. But adding the nail polish business to her life hasn’t gotten rid of the teacher in Hurley. On piggypaint.com, she offers suggestions for how to use nail painting as educational bonding time with your kids. That’s right, she says nail polish can been a learning tool. There are tips on the site for using the paint to help with fine motor skills or to learn about color names and patterns.
Although the product itself is manufactured in Pennsylvania, Hurley says she tries to use as many local sources as possible for her product. It’s all shipped from Cassville, and she works with local photographers and printers on her marketing materials. Hurley says she also has gotten a lot of help from hometown business-owners who gave her tips for getting started in a business of her own.
