Julia Holden empathizes with your struggle to get your baby to sleep.
In February 2024, she says, she and her husband noticed that their newborn son, Maxim, fell asleep faster when they gently covered his eyes with a burp cloth or small towel. As a new mom who was “in survival mode,” Holden looked for off-the-shelf products, comfortable eye coverings that wouldn’t touch her little face when she moved, but couldn’t find anything she liked, she said.
When Holden was young, she said, she dreamed of being an entrepreneur, so she immediately thought of making and selling the product herself. She designed a baby hat with a cover for the eyes, called it Sleepy Hat as a side business, and spent nearly $16,000 of her personal savings over the next year to launch it, she said.
Since June 2025, the business has been generating five-digit revenue every month, with more than $90,000 in December and more than $69,000 in January, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Holden says the company is making a profit. Holden started the company while working full-time as a senior relationship manager at an advertising agency and caring for a baby.
At home in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, she says she found 20 minutes between feedings to take a sleepy hat. “There was no outside funding, no team, no childcare outside of family help,” Holden, 34, said.
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Holden quit her $95,000-a-year job in October to focus on Sleepy Hut full-time. Most of the profits are reinvested back into the business, including paying two part-time contractors who help manage inventory and advertise on Google and Amazon. “I also recently hired an advisor who has a small amount of equity,” Holden says.
Holden paid herself $2,500 from the business in 2025 and is living off the rest of her personal savings and her husband’s income as an assistant director at Princeton University. She says she works 30 to 60 hours a week, including weekends.
She says it’s hard to do all of this while currently being the mother of a 2-year-old, but because she sets her own schedule, she at least has more time for herself and her family during the day than a 9-to-5.
“I’m still stressed, but for a more meaningful reason,” Holden says. “It feels more important. It’s much more satisfying.”
“My first sale from a stranger was life-changing.”
Holden didn’t have “evidence of market fit” when she decided to launch Sleepy Hut, she said. Instead, she took the idea to other mothers in her circle, all of whom called it “genius.”
She had planned to spend about $10,000 to launch the business, but went over budget with “product development, creating patterns, creating prototypes and samples…and then a bunch of little things like buying domains and trademarks (and) building websites,” she says.
She had no design knowledge, so the first hat pattern she made with her mother “didn’t quite fit,” she says. An entrepreneur friend introduced her to a factory in China, which sent her a prototype. But she says her “tech packs” (essentially clothing blueprints for manufacturers) weren’t detailed enough at first, resulting in about $1,500 worth of defective products.
Before creating the “Sleepy Hat,” Holden used fabric to prevent visual distractions during his son Maxim’s nap time.
julia holden
After finalizing the product design and ordering 1,500 units, Holden said he “splurged” on a photographer to fill the Sleepy Hut website with professional-looking images. The website was launched in September 2024 and didn’t generate many sales until around December, when Holden posted her products and website on the online marketplace Grommet, she said.
Sleepy Hat ended the year with total sales of just under $2,000. “My first sale from a stranger was life-changing,” Holden says. “I was very excited, but actually shipping the product was scary.”
Holden joined Amazon as a third-party seller in August 2025. Around that time, her posts on Sleepy Hat’s TikTok account started gaining traction, with some receiving hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes. Mothers bonded over comments about “FOMO babies” who slept on walks, in cars, and in restaurants, saying their children “needed” hats.
The road to “six digits plus”
Most of Holden’s sales come from paid online advertising, she said. She added that she is designing sleepy hats with new patterns and materials, improving her social media strategy and updating her packaging.
“My goal this year is to increase my own salary on a quarterly basis,” Holden says. “I want to double what I paid myself in the second quarter of April…I hope next year I can actually pay myself six figures more than I was making in my full-time job.”
Holden isn’t exactly a first-time entrepreneur—she previously launched a short-lived T-shirt brand and website for female runners—but she says she’s still working on improving her financial acumen and organizational skills. She has been working with an accountant, along with an advisor, to cover that weakness, she says.
The original sketch of the Sleepy Hat that Holden came up with in 2024.
julia holden
“You have to understand every dollar that comes out and every dollar that comes in,” she says. “And I’m not particularly limited, I’m just not drawn to spreadsheets…so it’s definitely a learning curve to take the time to understand the balance sheet and where every dollar is going, and it’s still a work in progress.”
Holden also learned the importance of trusting his instincts, she says. She recalls advising her sister, who runs a PowerPoint tutorial business, not to launch a startup as a new mom.
“She said, ‘I’m not going to start a business right now. You’re right[postpartum],'” Holden said. “And I was like, ‘Okay, I hear you. Let’s just do it.'”
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