I was recently sitting around with my business partners chatting about our Mabel journey. We realized that over the last few years, the Mabel lifestyle has at times been a bit crazy. We have certainly found ourselves in some pretty wacky situations. So entertaining was the discussion, it’s worth sharing a few moments.

The Early Days:

- We were working out of a tiny basement making labels until 3:00am then going home to start the day with our kiddos at 6:00am. Oh, and three of the four of us were pregnant. You can understand why whenever we heard our friends complaining about being tired we’d quietly roll our eyes. Doing that first trimester fatigue on three hours sleep…..well, not our best days.

- We did everything ourselves, including licking the envelopes. Ellis and Cynthia licked so many one night, they almost vomited. We had flashbacks to George Costanza’s fiancé’s untimely death on Seinfeld, the direct result of envelope licking. We quite easily could have been a sit com, but the star roles were very unglamourous!

- One terrible night a printer broke. We went into action and quickly problem solved the situation - my mom was called in immediately. You see, she is a retired primary school teacher with very nice handwriting. She hand wrote the address on every order that evening.

- We once folded 5000 brochures by hand because we couldn’t afford the $100 folding fee.

- We paid our first web designer with a foosball table in lieu of cash.

Other Crazy Stuff:

- While at a Baby Show, Mumby fixed Sarah’s (savvymom.ca) BlackBerry with a bunch of Sticky Labels samples. When I saw Sarah six months later, she proudly showed me her BlackBerry – still being held together by Mabel’s Labels. We’ve seen some good customer hacks in our time but this takes the cake.

- After doing a recent Pirate themed Baby Show (yes, weird, we know), for days Mumby’s facebook status updates only said things like “a-hoy”, “errrr” and “eye matey”.

- I once became a ‘camping expert’ in less than a day after getting a request for such an expert to appear on Breakfast Television. I’ve never googled so much about any one topic before in my life.

- Mumby has been known to chit-chat with the editors from Penthouse while trying desperately attempting to come up with a PR angle.

- Mumby has been seen walking around Chicago with Oprah labels, just in case she ran into Oprah.

- Cynthia and I once drove for six hours for a four minute TV spot, only to then turn around and drive home.

- We once sent a box of brochures off to a camp then found out that a camel arrived instead of our brochures. Yes, a camel. We still have no idea who intercepted the package, but this is the stuff Mabel legends are made of. The camp even forwarded us the picture of the camel, which arrived with a Mabel magnet attached to it! Full story here: http://www.mabel.ca/wordpress/?p=252.

And just when we thought we’d done it all and seen it all, last week Ellis and I somehow ended up modelling in a mama fashion show. Uh, you remember that I’m five weeks out of my sixth c-section, right? Well clearly I forgot that fact when I agreed to strut my mama stuff. Three words: pass the Spanx!

So from the dark and dreary corners of a basement to the catwalk, I can only imagine the weird and wonderful places Mabel will take us in the next few years!