34-year-old’s baby hat business brings in up to $90,000 a month
Julia Holden can understand the struggle to get 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 piece of gauze or a small towel. Holden says that as a new mom in “survival mode,” she was looking for an immediately affordable product—a comfortable eye cover that would stay on her little face if she moved—but couldn’t find one she liked.
Holden says he dreamed of entrepreneurship as a young adult, so his almost immediate thought was to make and sell the product himself. He designed an eye-covering baby hat, which gave his side hustle its name. Sleepy Hat and says he spent about $16,000 of his personal savings over the next year to launch the business.
Since June 2025, the business has generated five-figure revenue each month, including more than $90,000 in December and more than $69,000 in January, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Holden, who initially founded the company while working full-time as a senior relationship manager for an advertising company and caring for her baby, says the company is profitable.
At her home in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, she says she finds time for the Sleepy Hat in 20-minute intervals between feeds. “I had no outside financing, no staff, and no child care other than family help,” Holden, 34, says.
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Holden quit his $95,000-a-year job in October to focus on Sleepy Hat full-time. He says much of his profit is reinvested into the business, including the payroll of two part-time contractors who help with inventory and run ads on Google and Amazon. “I also recently hired a consultant, [who has] some equality,” says Holden.
Holden paid herself $2,500 from the job in 2025 and is living off her remaining personal savings and her husband’s income as an assistant principal at Princeton University. He says he works 30 to 60 hours a week, including weekends.
Now, as the mother of a 2-year-old, doing all this is burdensome, but since she sets her own schedule, she says, at least during the daytime, she can make more time for herself and her family than she would have from a 9-to-5.
“I’m still stressed, but it’s for a more meaningful reason,” Holden says. “It feels more important. It’s much more satisfying.”
‘The first sale I made from a stranger was life changing’
Holden says it didn’t have “evidence of marketability” when it decided to launch the Sleepy Hat. Instead, she took her idea to other mothers around her and said they all called it “genius.”
He planned to spend about $10,000 to launch the business and went over budget for “product development, building models, creating prototypes and mockups… and then all the little things that come together like buying a domain name, trademarking, etc.” [and] creating a website,” he says.
She didn’t have a design background, so she says the first pattern she created with her mother resulted in a hat that was “totally the wrong size.” An entrepreneur friend referred him to a factory in China that sent him prototypes. But he says the “tech suite,” which was essentially a clothing plan for manufacturers, wasn’t detailed enough to begin with, resulting in about $1,500 worth of defective product.
Before creating the “Sleepy Hat,” Holden used a washcloth to limit visual distractions while his son Maxime slept.
Julia Holden
After completing the product’s design and ordering 1,500 units, Holden says he “spent money” on a photographer to fill Sleepy Hat’s website with professional-looking images. The website launched in September 2024 and said it didn’t get much sales until December, when Holden posted its product and website on online marketplace Grommet.
Sleepy Hat ended the year with total sales of just under $2,000. “The first sale I made from a stranger was life-changing,” says Holden. “I was so excited, but also afraid to ship the product.”
Holden joined Amazon as a third-party seller in August 2025. Around that time, Sleepy Hat’s posts on her TikTok account began to gain traction, some garnering hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes. Moms joined in comments about “FOMO babies” struggling with sleep on walks, car rides or restaurants, saying they “need” hats for their kids.
The path to ‘six-figure plus’
He says most of Holden’s sales now come from paid online advertising. He adds that he designed Sleepy Hats with new patterns and materials, developed his social media strategy, and updated his packaging.
“My goal is to increase my own salary quarterly this year,” says Holden. “I expect to double the amount I pay myself in the second quarter of April…Hopefully next year I can pay myself more than I make at my full-time job, which is six-figure plus.”
This isn’t technically Holden’s first time being an entrepreneur; she had previously founded a short-lived t-shirt brand and a website for female runners. But he says he’s still working on his financial acumen and organizational skills. He says he is working with an accountant as well as his advisor to help him cover this weakness.
Holden’s original Sleepy Hat sketch was revealed in 2024.
Julia Holden
“You have to understand every dollar that goes out and every dollar that comes in,” he says. “And I’m not particularly limited. I don’t just 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 goes, and it’s still a work in progress.”
Holden says he also learned the value of trusting his instincts. She recalls a time when her sister, who owned a PowerPoint training business, advised against starting a startup as a new mother.
“He said: ‘I wouldn’t start a business right now. [freshly] postpartum,'” says Holden. “And I said, ‘Okay, I hear you.’ I’ll do it anyway.”
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