Q: What prompted you to found LemonAid Crutches?
A: My story is a little bit of a sad one. In August 2002, I was in a small-plane crash. My son, who was almost 2, and my husband and I were flying to Idaho, and we crashed about 20 minutes after takeoff. I lost both my husband and my son. I broke my femur. It didn’t heal, so I was on crutches for two years.
For the first year, I just had ugly crutches. It was a very difficult time of my life. My sister and I decided we needed to do something to cheer me up. We took my crutches, threw some automotive paint on them, rolled some fabric around them, and they made me feel better.
They were root-beer brown, and they had this leopard print on them. I thought if this can make me feel better during this time, other people have to respond to it too.
Q: When did you begin to think you could turn it into a business?
A: Probably about a year later. During that time, I was my own guinea pig. I quit a job I was doing and incorporated in February 2004. I spent a little bit over a year doing research and development and product improvement. Last year was when I put my website up live – lemonaidcrutches.com.
Q: Is your long-term goal to remain an Internet-only retailer?
A: Oh, no. I have some great ideas of how this is going to look. The intermediary step is to get some relationships with hospitals. My goal is to get into a hospital and give patients options. I keep envisioning this little kid who has just gotten out of surgery. Someone will deliver crutches to the room and say, “Do you want the blue ones or the pink ones or the purple ones?”
Q: Do you plan to expand beyond crutches?
A: Right now, I’m strictly doing underarm crutches that retail for about $150 a pair, including covers for the hands and arms. Forearm crutches – the kind with the cuff – are usually for people who are on crutches for a longer time, so there’s a little bit more competition for those. But I have gotten so many requests for forearm crutches that I think I can easily expand. My big one is going to be walkers.
Q: What is Step With Hope?
A: Step With Hope – www.stepwithhope.org – is a foundation I’ve established. Step With Hope goes back to the same tragedy that created LemonAid. It was a very difficult time. I just couldn’t imagine that my life would have taken that turn where I lost both my husband and my son.
I had some great support. I had a small community. I had a great church. I had amazing friends and family. All these things were crucial in recovering. I kept thinking, what if there was someone else out there like me who didn’t have that support?
Step With Hope was created to seek out and assist people who, like me, have lost multiple family members. My commitment is that 50 percent of the profits from LemonAid Crutches fund Step With Hope.
Q: Are there difficulties running a business that is so closely affiliated with a nonprofit?
A: The difficulty is the sense of obligation. I feel this incredible urgency to get LemonAid up, running and profitable as fast as I can so I have some profits to go into Step With Hope. At the same time, that’s a good thing because you become very aware of everything you’re doing. You have to watch your costs because there’s a responsibility of where this profit is going to go. I don’t think enough of our corporations have a social responsibility attached to them.
Q: What were you doing before you founded LemonAid?
A: I had two lives, so to speak. My husband and I lived in Portland, Ore., for several years. I was a retail buyer. We went through some hard times in our lives and wanted a lifestyle change. In the late ’90s, we moved back to Colorado, where we had lived before.
We changed our lifestyles completely. We sold the big house, came out here and had a more active, intertwined life. That’s when we had my son. We both went from careers to jobs. The job that I left to start LemonAid was as a part-time business manager and a bookkeeper for some local businesses.
Edited for space and clarity from an interview by staff writer Kristi Arellano.
