While playing around with colorful patterns and designs, a Spanish tile pattern stuck out to East alum and parent Karrie Dean Kaneda. She tried it out on phone cases and stationery, but none of that clicked. Then she put it onto a blanket.
“I wondered like ‘Why isn’t there a blanket out there that has these Spanish tile patterns?’” Karrie Dean said. “So, I decided to make it myself.”
Her idea couldn’t have come at a better time. She’d just been laid off by a local advertising agency, and she knew she couldn’t tolerate a typical nine-to-five job her whole life. So in August 2011, she started her own eco-friendly, online blanket business called Happy Habitat.
“I felt out what I get excited about,” Karrie Dean said. “Most of that is designing things like how you feel in your house and when you look around at your surroundings, what makes you happy and comforted.”
The problem was, she’d been collecting unemployment aid at the time and had no prior experience with entrepreneurship. Despite the initial challenges of starting a business with little experience, Karrie Dean has grown Happy Habitat into a brand that’s known across the U.S.
From learning HTML code to registering a domain for her website, everything was a learning process. Karrie Dean downloaded the first free design software she could find and taught herself how to design with the help of a few designer friends, numerous YouTube videos and Google searches. She outsourced the production of the blankets to a New Jersey knitting company.
“To be honest, there wasn’t a lot of encouragement at first,” Karrie Dean said. “It just drove me to succeed. When people saw things happening, that’s when they started to believe me.”
Having frequently gone camping with her family as a child, environmental consciousness is important to Karrie Dean — so Happy Habitat blankets are made with recycled content and their packaging is 100% recycled.
Rather than approaching public relations the standard way with press releases and formal statements, Karrie Dean directly introduced herself to people, stores and media outlets over email. She increased her credibility by getting her blankets onto flash sale sites where they’d only be available for limited amounts of time.
“I used to be nervous that it was just me without anyone speaking on my behalf,” Karrie Dean said. “But then I learned that that’s charming. Like it’s okay that my kids are in the background.”
Nine years after opening, Happy Habitat has customers from California to New York and just about everywhere in between. Its Instagram account has racked up over 13,000 followers, and Karrie Dean’s blankets have been featured in Cosmopolitan, HGTV magazine and the New York Times.
Even now, Karrie Dean continues to manage every aspect of her business — aside from the knitting and accounting. She fulfills orders, designs all of the products, updates tracking information and answers questions on the customer service side.
“One day you’re taking photos or designing things, and on another day you’re bookkeeping or invoicing,” Karrie Dean said. “It’s nice to have a balance where every day can look a little bit different.”
Karrie Dean has also had to find balance between her work and home life. To do so, she sets aside blocks of time in her hectic schedule. On her ideal Sunday, she works for an hour or so in the morning and then spends the rest of the day hanging out with her kids, East sophomore Reece and seventh grader Phoebe.
Happy Habitat has actually brought the family closer together, according to Karrie Dean. They celebrate together whenever a well-known company places a large order of throws, and on the flip side she teaches them how to respond to customer complaints.
Her kids also help out with simple tasks related to the business like data entry — even though they sometimes require a cash incentive. Phoebe acts as a model in promotional photoshoots, while Reece helps haul boxes of blankets and photoshoot props up to the studio.
“I think creating my own business would be cool,” Reece said. “I’ve definitely learned how they work by watching [my mom] do things like advertise and process orders.”
In response to COVID-19, the shipping time to customers has increased, and Karrie Dean removed the minimum amount of blankets per order to help other retailers stay afloat.
Something that surprised her is that a lot of customers send Happy Habitat blankets with messages as a gift to their loved ones in the hospital with COVID as a way of helping them get through it.
“It’s made [my work] more meaningful,” Karrie Dean said. “A throw is something cozy that you can grab and hold onto, especially for people who are by themselves.”