BENTONVILLE — SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth:
May 3, 1981, in Chillicothe, Mo.
Occupation:
Founder, Piggy Paint
Family:
Husband Michael, daughters Maddie and Macey
My favorite subject in school was
math, which has served me well. I didn’t have any business experience.
The best advice I ever received was
“never, never, never give up.”
When I’m driving my car, I like to listen to
KLRC [FM 101.1], or whatever is on my girls’ play list.
My secret talent is
pingpong.
A person I admire is
my dad, who always puts others before himself. He also knows the right thing to say at the right time, even if that means not talking.
Ten years from now
I have no idea what I’ll be doing, but I’m always up for an adventure!
One thing I’d like to do better is
walk in heels without looking awkward.
My favorite name of one of our polishes is
“Mac-n-Cheese Please,” which is still a frequent response from my daughters when I ask them what they want to eat.
The best part about growing up in a small town is
a sense of community and camaraderie.
You pretty much know everyone, directly or indirectly, which makes everyone celebrate (and grieve) as a unit.
The place I most want to visit is
Chillicothe High School, 1999. I would tell myself to chill out.
A word to sum me up:
compassionate
Melanie Hurley’s pingpong table is stained.
It’s the result of nail polish that burned its way through foam plates and left its mark on the table.
This was done intentionally, to demonstrate the difference between solvent-based nail polish and Hurley’s Piggy Paint, the natural, nontoxic nail polish she has sold all over the world.
The idea for Piggy Paint emerged this way - by accident - when Hurley was painting the nails of her two daughters, Maddie and Macey. Some nail polish dripped onto a foam plate and burned straight through it.
Melanie was horrified, and determined to find something safer.
“That’s who she is, a mom of young children, and that message is very authentic,” says one of her business partners, Greg Primm of Cave Springs.
“That’s been a huge thing [for the company’s success].”
The colors that worked their way to the pingpong table have long since dried, so they don’t splash when Hurley is slamming a ball home on game point.
The 31-year-old Hurley is a mother first, but right after that she’s fiercely competitive. She can’t stand losing at pingpong, and her husband claims that in more than a decade of marriage, he is still looking for that first victory over his wife.
“She’s extremely competitive,” Michael Hurley says. “When you play her in a game of pingpong, she is the most competitive person I’ve ever met. She’s outstanding at it.”
This competitive drive goes a long way toward explaining the success of Piggy Paint, founded in 2008. Hurley navigated a house with two young girls and thousands of bottles of nail polish while she got the company going.
She used what little money the couple had to attend trade shows around the country, spreading the popularity of Piggy Paint mostly by word of mouth, from one concerned mother to another. Back home in Cassville, Mo., she would barricade herself ina bathroom or closet if she needed to take an important call, shifting between entrepreneur and mommy in a moment’s notice.
Today the Hurleys live in Bentonville, and both girls are in school full time, meaning Mom can dedicate uninterrupted time to the company at its Springdale headquarters.
In the early days of the company, though, Maddie and Macey were always around the house.
Macey would sit beside Melanie at the computer, brushing her mom’s hair as she typed. There were breaks for Dora the Explorer and macaroni and cheese, forcing Melanie to work late into the night after the girls had gone to bed.
“I worked way too many hours at the beginning, but you have to if you want to succeed,” she says. “From other countries, I’d have calls at all hours. It was hard for a long time to find a balance, because I wanted my kids to be with me the whole time.”
Looking back on those first years, Hurley says that “it probably wasn’t such a great idea” to have the girls in such proximity all the time, but today she has found that balance. She can drive them to school and then head to Springdale, focusing on the girls when it’s time to be a mother and the company when it’s time to be a businesswoman.
And business is good. Piggy Paint is sold all over the country, as well as in Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia. It can be bought online or at countless stores, including Wal-Mart and Toys R Us.
Hurley’s creation has been featured in dozens of publications - from parentfocused magazines to more general ones like People.com and Real Simple, and she has done television interviews that have been broadcast to a nationwide audience.
“It’s been such a blur; I can’t believe it’s been four years,” Hurley says. “It’s pretty crazy, because I am as average as you get, so it cracks me up that people want to hear the story.”
SMALL-TOWN GIRL
Many entrepreneurs follow a template of sorts.
They’re the kids who are coming up with business ideas almost from the moment they can walk, the ones who eschew sports and other after-school activities to operate lemonade stands and mow lawns.
Hurley doesn’t fit this template.
“I never thought [she would start a business],” says lifelong friend Allison Pickering of Tulsa. “She’s always been determined and a gogetter, but she wanted to be a teacher.”
Hurley was born and reared in Chillicothe, a small town in northern Missouri. Pickering, who met Hurley in kindergarten, describes it as “Norman Rockwell-esque,” the kind of place where all of Main Street would shut down for the homecoming parade.
Growing up, Hurley always kept a full schedule. She played tennis and softball and ran track in high school, and began working at age 14, doing things like working in a sandwich shop or keeping score at baseball games.
Hurley wasn’t the kind of teenager who started businesses, but was someone who was willing to take a few risks. If the mood struck her, she would wear two differentcolored socks to school.
“She’s never been a person who was afraid to stand out in a crowd,” Pickering says. “She wasn’t afraid to think a little outside the box, and I think her creativity is something that really contributed to where she is today.”
After graduating from high school in 1999, Hurley headed to Southwest Missouri State University (today Missouri State University) in Springfield. She entered college with 31 credit hours, so she needed just three years to earn her bachelor’s degree in elementary education.
Within a few weeks of graduation, she married Michael Hurley - they had met in college - and moved to LaGrange, Ga., where Michael was a park ranger. Melanie took a job teaching second grade.
CARING FOR KIDS
In Georgia, Hurley taught in a school where extreme poverty was the norm, and many children came from transient families. She loved it.
While growing up, Hurley had traveled all over the United States on summer church missions, working with children in poverty. She believed it was her destiny to become a teacher and help children with challenging backgrounds.
“When I was 18, I just knew God was saying, ‘You’re going to be a teacher,’” Hurley says. “I’ve always loved working with kids and always had a heart for people in poverty.”
The kids in LaGrange were “my babies before I had babies,” she says, and she has stayed involved in the lives of former pupils. Maddie was given the middle name Ava after one of her mother’s favorite pupils, and more thanone former pupil has stayed at the Hurley household in recent years.
“She’s a great teacher, because she just loves kids,” Michael Hurley says. “Really, it’s just her caring nature, and she’s one of those people that, whatever she’s going to do, she’s going to be the best at it.”
After two years, the couple moved to Rogers. They were there a year, during which time Melanie Hurley taught fifth grade at Eastside Elementary before they decided to move to Cassville, Mo. Melanie and Michael had grown up in small towns, and they yearned to live in a place that size as they were starting a family.
Melanie left teaching to be at home with the girls. She periodically daydreamed about coming up with a business idea, but never went that deep into the matter - until she spilled that nail polish onto a foam plate.
BURNING A HOLE
She was shocked when she saw the polish burning a hole in the plate, and she knew other mothers would be alarmed, too.
“A big reason why she’s done really well is because she has an authentic story to tell,” says Primm, her business partner. “It’s a story that resonates with folks.”
Hurley had the idea for a safe nail polish, but didn’tknow what to do with it. There were no entrepreneurs in her family, and neither she nor Michael had any business background.
She started by finding a chemist who could create a safe polish. Piggy Paint is about 70 percent water, odorless, hypoallergenic and free of harsh chemicals like ethyl acetate, a common ingredient in many nail polishes.
The name Piggy Paint was inspired by Macey, who loved when her mom played “This Little Piggy” with her. Hurley started out with 14 colors, with their names often inspired by funny things her girls said.
“I really based everything off my kids,” Hurley says. “I tried to make it something I would want to buy as a consumer. I was the target audience, a mother, and the kids were the target group, so I picked colors I knew they would like.”
Piggy Paint’s official launch came in September 2008, when the Hurleys booked two tickets to Las Vegas and set up a small booth at the ABC Kids Expo. Michael says they were extremely anxious at first, but when curious potential customers came up to their table, Melanie’s confidence overcame her nerves.
The show went well, which Melanie credits to her faith.
“I was so nervous because we didn’t have a ton of cash, but things are so differentwhen you open yourself up and try something new,” she says. “If it’s a God-inspired vision and you just walk through the doors that are open, it’s scary, but also gives you a sense of peace.”
UNAFFECTED BY FAME
By now, Hurley has done interviews with media outlets all over the country.
She has been flown out to California to paint nails at a birthday party for the daughter of actress Tori Spelling. While out there, she walked into luxury boutiques and was surprised to see bottles of Piggy Paint for sale.
She has traveled extensively and is routinely contacted by mothers who want to start their own businesses.
“She’s always liked celebrities - she’s the type that will read People magazine - so I always joke with her, ‘You’re getting time in the spotlight here,’” Michael says. “But she’s very humble; she’s no different than she was the day this started.”
Getting to this point wasn’t easy. Piggy Paint operated out of Hurley’s house, and balancing being a stay-at-home mom and a full-time entrepreneur was difficult for her. Jars of polish were stashed under the bed and inside closets and cabinets - anywhere there was space.
In 2009, the company hired its first employee, Taylor Weaver, the daughter oftheir pastor in Cassville. At the end of that year, Hurley sold part of the company to Primm and her other partner, Marc Bryant, in order to have the capital to keep going.
“She [balanced] it phenomenally well,” says Weaver, who today is Piggy Paint’s operations manager. “Because she was a teacher, she’s able to multitask, and she can handle children running around.”
Piggy Paint moved into its Springdale warehouse in June 2010, and when Macey began kindergarten last fall Melanie was freed up to go into the office and work a more regular schedule.
Today, she has a much clearer line between work and family. There is the time when she’s working to expand the company - dreaming up new colors and new products like nail stickers, paint pens and “Puppy Paint” (nail polish for dogs) - and the time when she’s with the family.
She has coached the girls in softball, doing her best to keep her competitive fires under control, and always has time to paint the girls’ nails. Usually, they like to go with 10 colors at once.
“As it grows, it’s given her the opportunity to do what she truly loves, which is the vision of it all,” Weaver says. “Melanie is such a people person. She does a great job explaining her heart behind it, because it’s not just a product for her; it’s her vision.”
Northwest Profile, Pages 33 on 06/24/2012