When Moms Mean Business: Three Startups That Sprang From a Mother's Influence

Small business takeaway:

• The key lesson from three mother-inspired startups is that origin stories can become growth strategies. Nadas Empanadas shows how a family recipe can scale when paired with modern retail and manufacturing infrastructure; Elf on the Shelf turned a household ritual into an entertainment franchise; and Mrs. Meyers disrupted the cleaning aisle by making eco-conscious, garden-scented products feel effective, premium, and mainstream.

Historically, people might think of most family-owned businesses as passed down from fathers to sons, but for some startups, mothers have played a key role in their children’s enterprises.

Companies including Elf on the Shelf, Mrs. Meyers Clean Day, and Nadas Empanadas would not exist as they are today without the influence and talents of the family matriarch.

“We would not be here at all without my mother,” said Carlos Santos, Founder of Nadas Empanadas, in an interview with CO—.

The company is currently rolling out its gluten-free, frozen empanadas, which use the recipes created by his mother, Olga Santos, for her former restaurant, Aqui Es Santa Fe. The empanadas are available in Whole Foods and other supermarkets in the Northeast, as well as in the Nadas retail stores that Carlos and Olga operate in Harrison, New York, and New York City.

Family businesses are under pressure, however. According to PwC’s 2025 U.S. Family Business Survey, while 52% of U.S. family businesses reported sales growth, that’s down from 81% in 2023.

“U.S. family businesses face broad macroeconomic pressures — from inflation to geopolitical risks — that have shifted their focus toward protecting margins and reinforcing core operations rather than aggressive growth,” the report concluded.

For some family-owned businesses, however, growth is still very much on the table, whether that involves diversifying their brand into new channels, as Elf on the Shelf has done, or expanding the distribution of existing products to reach more consumers, as Nadas Empanadas is doing. Others are able to convert their success into the sale of their brands to larger entities, as Mrs. Meyer’s did when it sold to SC Johnson, which is itself a family-owned enterprise.

Nadas Empanadas turns a mother’s recipes into a frozen-food success

For Carlos Santos, the pandemic in 2020 created an opportunity to offer his mother’s Colombian-style empanadas to a broader audience. He began offering them at pop-ups and was providing them to frontline workers during the pandemic while the restaurant business was stalled.

When Olga opened her restaurant as a single mother, she was focused on making a living to support herself and her son, he said.

“She wasn’t thinking about going into [consumer packaged goods] and raising capital and doing those kinds of things,” he said. “She was just trying to survive.”

Santos, who had a background in the hospitality industry and had been helping his mother run her restaurant before he launched Nadas, said he saw the opportunity to create a business based on the popularity of the empanadas she made.

“I think every younger generation thinks about things in a larger scope,” said Santos.

The company started out making the empanadas at her restaurant. After the business closed in 2024, they opened the Nadas store and began making them there. They have since found a co-manufacturing partner in Florida that is helping them keep up with the growing retail demand and at the same time helping Nadas expand into new markets in the Southeast.

Olga continues to run things at the store, which offers both frozen and fresh empanadas and other foods and beverages.

“I’m very conscious of the fact that if it wasn't for her sacrifice and her hard work and her tenacity, we would not be in the position that we're in,” he said. “Every day I am eternally grateful for her.”

Elf on the Shelf got its start in a mother’s family traditions

The Elf on the Shelf franchise has become a global, multifaceted enterprise with a variety of holiday-themed products and even a series of Netflix shows. It got its start, however, in a holiday tradition of placing a small pixie elf in the holiday tree as a messenger to Santa.

Sisters Chanda Bell and Christa Pitts, together with their mother, Carol Aebersold — who herself had passed on the elf tradition from her mother — turned the tradition into a picture book, which they sold at small holiday fairs.

Although major book publishers at first passed on the idea, the book, which was packaged with a red-suited elf doll, soon became a global phenomenon.

The company got a big boost from a candid 2007 photograph of Actor Jennifer Garner walking down the street carrying a copy of the book, leading to a flurry of interest.

As Elf on a Shelf celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, Bell and Pitts are evolving their company into a year-round entertainment and lifestyle brand, complete with new characters that are part of what the company calls the Santaverse. The company also recently expanded into a partnership for a video game and released a new book, “The Rise of Nicholas the Noble,” which tells Santa Claus’ origin story, and has inked partnerships with brands from The Hershey Company to Beaches Resorts.

[Read more: The Elf on the Shelf Founders on Evolving From a Beloved Holiday Business to Multimedia, Year-Round Brand Expansion]

Mrs. Meyer’s very identity is a reflection of the founder’s mother

Monica Nassif, the Founder of the Mrs. Meyer’s cleaning products brand, gives so much credit to her mother that she wrote a book about her influence: I Bottled My Mother.

The book tells the story about how her mother, Thelma Meyer, ran the household — which included nine children by the time she was 31 years old — with discipline and a no-nonsense Midwestern sensibility.

“She was frugal, she was a good cook, and she raised us to be adults, not children,” Nassif said in a recent podcast interview.

When Nassif launched the Mrs. Meyer’s brand in 1999, she decided to imbue it with the qualities she admired about her mother, featuring scents such as basil, lavender, and lemon verbena and made with plant-based, eco-friendly ingredients. At the time, most cleaners smelled like bleach and ammonia, she said in an interview with CO—.

The combination of aroma, plant-based ingredients, and efficacy grew to set a new standard for the industry. “We had a hard time getting it going, but it turned into a rocket ship,” said Nassif.

SC Johnson acquired Mrs. Meyer’s in 2008 and continues to operate it under the Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day brand.

[Read more: How the Founder of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Disrupted the Household Cleaning Market With a Brand Inspired by Her Mom]

— With reporting by Deborah Lynn Blumberg.

CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.

CO—is committed to helping you start, run and grow your small business. Learn more about the benefits of small business membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, here.