When we introduced you to Maia Haag seven years ago, she was headed for a $340,000 annual gross with an imaginative, home-based business that published highly personalized keepsake children's books.
Haag's I See Me Inc. is still a cottage industry, but with a lot more zeros behind the dollar sign: Sales were $4.9 million in 2007 and are on track to top $5.3 million this year.
That's a compound annual growth rate of nearly 50 percent since 2001. Not bad, considering that the slowing economy has held her company's growth below 10 percent in each of the past two years.
That's not the only change since Haag introduced the original book, a charming, full-color volume dubbed My Very Own Name. The plot: A series of animals drawn by professional illustrators presents the first letter of their names to spell out a child's name, each with a short rhyme attached.
Haag, 41, has taken the business much farther, introducing a fairy-tale book for little girls, an entertaining introduction to the ABCs using the animals introduced in the first book, and an inspired entry that turns a child's own words and drawings into a book.
Oh yes -- and a 100-piece jigsaw puzzle that incorporates the child's name and birth date. Introduced in August, the puzzle was four years in development in search of a die-cutting process that would allow the customization.
Haag didn't do it alone however; her husband, Allan, 45, owns Haag Design Inc., a Minneapolis graphic design company, and he created the sophisticated look of the company's hardcover books. He also designed all of I See Me's marketing materials.
The I See Me brainstorm erupted in 1998, when Maia was on leave from her brand-marketing job at General Mills after the birth of the first of her three children. A friend sent a personalized book that inserted the baby's name into a story about a trip to the zoo.