Chapter 3 of 100
Amilya Antonetti
b. 1967 | American entrepreneur
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At The Bottom |
— 1993
"The euphoria of David’s arrival was replaced with a tidal wave of fear..."
She was just an ordinary suburban mother from San Leandro, California, and Amilya Antonetti couldn’t figure out why her new baby boy, David, was suffering to terribly. He cried constantly, keeping his parents awake at all hours of the night. His breath was often short and marked by a dry, hacking cough; he developed horrible skin problems, with bumpy rashes covering his body. At times when she changed his diaper the skin on his legs and bottom would simply peel away in sheets. David’s eyes seemed glassy, and he had a chronic runny nose. A variety of doctors and specialists were baffled by the baby’s condition. They took x-rays, drew blood, checked him for allergies — and yet they were unable to explain what might be wrong. Some chalked it up to colic; others suggested she was overreacting. Meanwhile, Antonetti’s heart was breaking. “The euphoria of David’s arrival was replaced with a tidal wave of fear,” she wrote in 2003. “All I knew was that my son, the most precious gift I had ever received, was in agony, and nothing I did seemed to ease his suffering.”
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At The Top |
— 2003
Soapworks, the company she’d founded in 1995, had more than $10 million in sales
Amilya Antonetti looked at her company books for the previous year and was astonished to see that Soapworks — the company she’d founded in 1995 — had cleared more than $10 million worth of business. Dubbed “the better choice mom” by Oprah Winfrey, Antonetti had just finished her first book, Why David Hated Tuesdays, a guide for parents looking to make their homes less toxic and safer. Soapworks had grown out of Antonetti’s discovery that ordinary household chemicals were making her son sick; each year, it had doubled its sales as Antonetti and her growing stable of employees (she had more than 50 by 2003) developed new products. Her bar soaps, laundry soaps, body washes, non-chlorine bleaches and all-purpose cleaners were sold at stores like Trader Joe’s, Linens Ôn Things, and Hudson Bay Companies. Her success had been covered on Winfrey’s show as well as on “The Early Show” on CBS, and she was a much-sought speaker for business conventions and parenting groups. And most importantly, her son David had lived the past seven years without discomfort.
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The Comeback |
At last, she’d had enough and took matters into her own hands...
For two years, Antonetti watched as her son’s condition remained unchanged. She listened to her doctors and hoped he would somehow improve. At last, she’d had enough and took matters into her own hands. She began to keep a detailed journal of her son’s life, trying to discover some sort of pattern or trigger that might explain his condition. Soon, she noticed that her son was always worse on the days of the week that she cleaned the house. For the first time in her life, she read the labels on her cleaning products and began to research some of the chemicals they contained. In the course of her reading, she found cases of other children who experienced adverse reactions to common household cleaning supplies. Immediately, she stopped cleaning the house. Dishes piled up and the laundry stayed dirty, but for the first time in his life, David was sleeping peacefully through the night and was noticeably less ill. Unable to find soaps or cleaning products that were free of the chemicals that provoked such a reaction in her son, Amilya Antonetti began experimenting in her own kitchen sink. She collected soap recipes from the 19th century and before long had developed a line of homemade products — hand, dish and laundry soaps — that did not make her son sick. She began to meet other mothers facing similar problems, and she realized the products she was making might be useful to other kids as well. And so in November 1995, Antonetti launched Soapworks, a small company that produced nontoxic soaps. When grocery stores elected not to stock her products, she took out ads in local newspapers and sold directly to mothers who were concerned about their kids’ allergies. When an advertising executive at a local radio station saw Antonetti’s newspaper ads, he offered her airtime to promote her product. With a good radio voice, Antonetti was soon offered a guest slot on a weekly talk show, and with 250,000 listeners, she quickly found herself swamped with orders.” None of this would have happened if Antonetti hadn’t taken charge of the situation and realized that she was the best expert on her child’s well being. “We are taught to look to ‘experts’ for our answers,” she writes, “only to find out that they often have no real-life experience on the subject. When all is said and done, change begins with you. Strength, willpower, responsibility, commitment and integrity grow from within and blossom only under your direction.”
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