#MomCrush Monday: Meet Cara Oppenheimer and Cary Fortin, Founders of Goodbuy

1.) You’re both busy moms, mompreneurs, founders of goodbuy. How do you keep yourselves organized?

Cara: Having two kiddos and a “business baby” is a lot. For me, ideas don’t pick and choose when they march into my brain, whether it be during work hours, or during a family holiday. So keeping organized means having one single place on my phone that helps me to prioritize and aggregate these ideas and thoughts. So for me, my notes app is my lifeline, organized by; “must do today”, “must do tomorrow”, “must do this week”, and “must do eventually.” It allows me to easily drop in half-baked or fully-baked ideas and get them out of my brain and onto “paper”.

Cary: Oh my. Well, calling myself “organized” would be a stretch, but my google calendar is the only thing that keeps me straight. I put everything on it. Date nights, doctors appointments, to-do lists, not to mention all my work meetings and events. My husband and close friends know to send me a calendar invite for camping trips, coffee dates, even my own birthday dinner! It’s a real act of compassion on their parts and I love them for it:) Oh, and I have to set alarms for those calendars too!

2.) You met each other while BOTH 6 months pregnant and touring a daycare. What a sweet way to meet! Tell us more about how it all started and how you knew you were meant to meet each other AND build something so special together?

Cara: Coming together during such a pivotal time in our lives was so special. We were both transplants in Idaho, both 20 weeks pregnant, and both touring the same daycare at the same time. Essentially Cary’s husband made a crass comment about the lack of diversity in the classroom, and I enjoyed the comment a lot more than the daycare. We laughed, we exchanged numbers and ended up very fast friends. We delivered our kids in the hospital two days apart, shared the same maternity leave, road some emotional new mom rollercoasters together and we’re smitten for life. 

Early on in our friendship we discussed many ways in which we could solve the world’s problems. Cary as a bleeding heart environmentalist and me a daughter of small business owners, the writing was on the wall for goodbuy. We often discussed how the rise of mega-retailers and major e-commerce stores negatively impacted not just my parent’s business, but so many other small business owners.

During the pandemic, I bought a few insulated water bottles on the website of a mega-retailer and when I went to visit my parents in their store shortly after, I noticed that at the point-of-purchase display were the exact same water bottles. It just hit me, there are thousands of businesses out there carrying the exact products we all need, we just can’t see them at the moment we’re looking to buy. So, two nights later, while breastfeeding my son at 4am, I texted Cary “It’s a browser extension that intercepts all of your reflexive, online, mega-retail shopping and offers you the same product, or better, from a small business that aligns with your values.” She woke up and said, “THIS is it.” and we got to work.

Cary: A few years into our friendship, recognizing that we both had natural problem-solver /entrepreneurial natures, Cara and I set up work meetings to kick around potential business ideas — partly to just be creative together, but definitely tinged with the hope that we come across something promising. Everything we came up with centered around our shared growing passion for conscious consumption and the aching need we felt — as moms of young kids a year into the pandemic — to make our lives easier. So when I got that text in the middle of the night from Cara, I knew in my bones THIS was the idea.

With four kids under four when we began this journey, we knew that we wouldn’t be the typical entrepreneurs (though we did start working in Cara’s garage!) but we also knew that was our greatest advantage. We’d just made it through 18 months as working moms of little kids through a global pandemic; we could do anything. By utilizing our expertise as women and moms by boldly leading this endeavor together, it just felt right to lean into our expertise, be our own cheerleaders, and do this thing together. 

3.) goodbuy is a first-of-its-kind online shopping tool that connects consumers with small businesses that align with their values, and does so in a simple and streamlined way.  Why do you find this important and much needed in the everyday lives of our readers?

Cara: 70% of all online spending (in the U.S.) goes into the pockets of 15 mega-retailers, which meant that small businesses were ending up on the last pages of our online search results. So, when we created goodbuy, we wanted to provide an option that brought visibility to small business, while also bringing a sense of joy and ease to our shopping experience. As moms, we always felt like we had to set aside extra  time to shop in alignment with our values. Adding an element of efficiency to values-based shopping changes all that. With goodbuy, busy moms like us can easily use the goodbuy platform to support over 185,000 small businesses, discover incredible brands, and feel good about what we purchase. 

Cary: And, as moms, we also know how critical it is to be able to shop these products in the few spare seconds we get during the day. So we are really proud of goodbuy’s recent mobile app launch that allows users to easily shop their values right from their phones, generating more sales for these businesses. We can’t tell you how many DMs we have received from small businesses who are excited about the community we are building, as well as messages from customers who have just discovered their new favorite women-owned boutique or ethically-made beauty brand. When we continue to see actual dollars being spent away from the mega-retailers, directly impacting thousands of small businesses across the country, it reminds us how important this work is and will continue to be. 

4.) Both of you had a very successful career journey before becoming founders of goodbuy. Can you share how you both mustered up the courage to step away from that and build something from the ground up? If we have readers who are hesitant in doing the same thing, what advice would you give?

Cara: It was a long journey for me. I worked for nearly 17 years as a Creative Director, managing teams at various agencies. It was a really great job, with some really great people, which made this leap all that much harder. For me it was never a question of “if” I would leave, it was “when”. As a mom of two littles, I was not afforded the option of forgoing my salary and sailing off into the sunset. I needed an idea, an idea I intuitively felt could go somewhere, and I needed some external validation in the form of industry experts. So, while working my agency-life job, Cary and I worked nights, and weekends and nap-times to solidify our plans, and seek out those moments of validation within our network. The true trigger came in the form of dollars, goodbuy had an investor, and I gave my notice. Advice? Well, I wish I did it sooner. I wish I had just lept, but I’m a strong believer that everything happens for a reason, so here we are.  

Cary: My experience is different from Cara’s in that this is actually my second business I’ve co-founded. I’d previously worked for almost a decade on New Minimalism and saw first hand how challenging and insanely rewarding it is to build something meaningful from nothing with a human I deeply respect. For me, I like to frame up the question of my career and other life decisions in this way: What lights me up? What is a problem that I’m uniquely able to solve? When I’m an old lady looking back on my life, what will I be most proud of? What do I want my daughters to see when they look at me? When I ask myself those kinds of questions, the risks of a big move feel so much smaller while the risks of staying stagnant feel extreme.

5.) What is your favorite song lyric? Why?

Cara: I’d like to come up with something profound here. But I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t say this “Ride it, my pony. My saddle’s waiting. Come and jump on it”  Why is my favorite song lyric? The beat, the vibes, the dance-ability, the nostalgia. That’s why.

Cary: Hahaha, it’s tough to follow Cara’s song (even though I 10000% knew this was her answer), but I’ll give it a go. Brandi Carlisle is a light in my life; her lyrics are like a portal to a higher power for me. In particular I love “Crowded Table” from The Highwomen (her band with Maren Morris, Amanda Shires and Natalie Hemby), “I want a house with a crowded table / and a place by the fire for everyone / let us take on the world while we’re young and able / and bring us back together when the day is done.”

I will also say that when we are crashing at the end of a long day, our shared go-to’s are 90s pop and R&B — think Whitney Houston, Usher, and Lauryn Hill radio. It’s an instant mood booster and just such a call back to us being kids playing our first CDs on boomboxes in our rooms; it puts everything in perspective and I couldn’t recommend it more highly!