Julia Holden can relate to the struggle of getting your baby to fall asleep.
In February 2024, she and her husband noticed that their newborn son Maxime fell asleep more quickly when his eyes were gently covered with a burp cloth or small towel, she says. As a new mom “in survival mode,” Holden quickly looked for a purchasable product — a comfortable eye covering that’d stay on his tiny face if he moved — but couldn’t find one she liked, she says.
As a younger adult, Holden had dreamed of entrepreneurship, so her near-instant thought was to make this product herself and sell it, she says. She designed a baby hat with an attached eye covering, named her side hustle Sleepy Hat and, over the course of the next year, spent nearly $16,000 from her personal savings to bootstrap the business, she says.
Since June 2025, the business has brought in five figures in revenue each month, including over $90,000 in December and more than $69,000 in January, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The company is profitable, says Holden, who initially launched it while working full-time as a senior relationship manager for an advertising company and taking care of her baby.
She found time for Sleepy Hat in 20-minute windows between breast-feedings at her home in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, she says. “I had no outside funding, no team and no child care beyond family help,” says Holden, 34.
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Holden quit her job — which paid her $95,000 a year, she says — in October to focus on Sleepy Hat full-time. Most of its profits have been reinvested back into the business, including payroll for two-part-time contractors who help with inventory and running ads on Google and Amazon, she says. “I also recently took on an advisor, [who has] a little bit of equity,” Holden says.
Holden paid herself $2,500 from the business in 2025, and has been living off her remaining personal savings and her husband’s income as an assistant director at Princeton University. She works anywhere from 30 to 60 hours per week, including weekends, she says.
Doing all of that while being a mom to a now-2-year-old is taxing, but since she sets her own schedule, she can at least take more time during daylight hours for herself and her family than she did at a 9-to-5, she says.
“I’m still stressed, but for a more meaningful reason,” says Holden. “It feels more important. It’s much more satisfying.”
‘My first sale from a stranger was life-changing’
Holden didn’t have “proof of market fit” when she decided to launch Sleepy Hat, she says. Rather, she brought the idea to other moms in her circle, who she says all called it “genius.”
She intended to spend about $10,000 launching the business, and surpassed her budget on “product development, creating patterns, creating prototypes and samples … and then all the tiny little things that add up, like purchasing a domain, a trademark [and] building a website,” she says.
She didn’t have a design background, so the first pattern she and her mom created together resulted in a hat that was “completely the wrong size,” she says. An entrepreneur friend referred her to a factory in China, which sent her prototypes. But her “tech pack” — a garment blueprint for manufacturers, essentially — initially wasn’t detailed enough, resulting in about $1,500 worth of defective products, she says.
Before creating the “Sleepy Hat,” Holden would use a cloth to limit visual distractions during nap time for her son, Maxime.
Julia Holden
After finalizing the product’s design and ordering 1,500 units, Holden “splurged” on a photographer to fill a website for Sleepy Hat with professional-looking images, she says. The website launched in September 2024, and didn’t receive many sales until around December, when Holden posted her product and website on online marketplace Grommet, she says.
Sleepy Hat ended the year with just under $2,000 in total sales. “My first sale from a stranger was life-changing,” says Holden. “I was so excited but also terrified to actually ship the product.”
Holden joined Amazon as a third-party seller in August 2025. Roughly around then, her posts on Sleepy Hat’s TikTok account started gaining traction, with some garnering hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes. Moms bonded in the comments over their “FOMO babies” who fought sleep while on walks, car rides or in restaurants, saying they “needed” the hat for their kids.
The road to ‘six-figures plus’
Most of Holden’s sales now come from paid online advertising, she says. She’s designing Sleepy Hats with new patterns and materials, improving her social media strategy and updating her packaging, she adds.
“The goal is to increase my own salary on a quarterly basis this year,” says Holden. “I hope to double what I pay myself in Q2 in April … I hope next year to be able to pay myself actually more than what I was making at my full-time job, so six-figures plus.”
Holden isn’t technically a first-time entrepreneur — she previously started a short-lived T-shirt brand and website for women runners — but she’s still working on her financial acumen and organizational skills, she says. She’s worked with an accountant, alongside her advisor, to help her cover that weakness, she says.
The original Sleepy Hat sketch Holden came up with in 2024.
Julia Holden
“You need to understand every dollar that’s coming out and every dollar that’s coming in,” she says. “And I’m not particularly finite. I just don’t gravitate towards spreadsheets … So it’s definitely been a learning curve to force myself to take the time and understand the balance sheet and where every dollar is going, and it’s still a work in progress.”
Holden has also learned the value of trusting her gut, she says. She recalls a moment when her sister, who owns a PowerPoint tutorial business, advised against launching a startup as a new mom.
“She was like, ‘I would not start a business right now. You’re [freshly] postpartum,'” Holden says. “And I was like, ‘OK, I hear you. I’m going to do it anyway.'”
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