Massapequa Mom Turns Mother-Daughter Craft Activities Into 'WonderMom Box' Crafting Business

MASSAPEQUA, NY — When Melissa Ninan started having craft time with her daughter, she wasn’t planning to turn it into a startup. She’s a teacher at Syosset High School and a mother of two, and craft time presented an opportunity to spend valuable quality time with her then-two-year-old daughter.

But then, a funny thing happened: As the craft sessions continued, Ninan realized her daughter was picking up important developmental skills through crafting. Things like hand-eye coordination, for example, had been honed in the hours of gluing and coloring the two did together.

After some other moms began taking notice, Ninan found the idea for her new business: WonderMom Box, a craft delivery service that sends a box packed with creative activities straight to customers’ doors. The activities might include drawing, gluing, painting or other artistic endeavors. The currently available “Easter Box” will allow kids to make customized drinking cups, shaped like bunnies, with their names on them.

Ninan launched the business this year, putting together Valentine’s Day themed boxes for parents to craft with their kids. She followed that up with a St. Patrick’s Day box, and now, as mentioned above, an Easter box.

While the themes have aligned with holidays so far, Ninan said the idea to make this a business in the first place was born out of her own experiences.

“I've always liked doing different activities with my daughter. She’s currently four, but when she was two, I started doing simple crafts with her. I really liked that, to have one on one time together. She was focused, she was engaged, and it was something that she ended up looking forward to every single day, which just kind of started as a spur of the moment sort of thing,” Ninan said. “As time went on, she got older, and I was coming up with all different types of crafts to keep her engaged and learning, and it just turned into a whole thing…I had all the moms reaching out to me, [asking] ‘how do you come up with these activities? How do you know what to do?’”

The answer to how she came up with her crafting ideas, Ninan said, was one she came by honest.

“Because my daughter loved it. Now that she's older, she's learning how to write, and different skills, and I really see now, looking back, how useful these activities and crafts actually were for her hand-eye coordination, for creativity, for cognitive development. Being a teacher myself, it kind of just came full circle,” Ninan said.

While the inspiration came from her own daughter, Ninan said she also has other moms and their kids on the brain when she’s designing the craft boxes for WonderMom Box. With a master’s degree in education and a dozen years of teaching experience, Ninan had plenty of experience finding creative ways to teach a lesson. The WonderMom Box journey, however, started as a labor of love.

“I love teaching in the classroom, but this time with my daughter, we would always sit at the kitchen table and do these crafts. It's been, a huge highlight. Just looking back, I love those memories with her, and I continue to make them every day…So it's just something that kind of came together with my background and my own children, kind of combining them,” Ninan said.

The craft boxes are a tool that Ninan hopes can bring some parents and their kids together, but there’s also an added benefit: They’re screen-free. At a time when parents around the country are obsessing over how much time their kids spend staring at a screen, big or small, Ninan said her products might offer a respite from that.

“I want to keep [kids] engaged. Screen time is great, because it gives moms time to do what we need to do, but at the same time, they need to be learning,” Ninan said. “A statistic which I just personally find fascinating, is that by age five, 90% of brain development is actually achieved, for kids. It really shows that those early years truly matter, and what you do at home when they're so little, it makes a difference. And how do children learn at home? They learn through play, they learn from doing hands-on activities in class. So that was kind of my goal, where they're busy, they're focused, they're engaged, they're learning, and then making it convenient for moms, because moms are busy.”

Right now, Ninan might be one of the busier moms on the block. She designs, packs and writes instructions for all of the WonderMom boxes, with some help from her husband on designing the company website.

“Right now, I create all the boxes, I find the products I need, put everything together, make the instruction sheets. I'm starting out,” Ninan said. “On a larger scale, I'd probably have to bring in, you know, some other moms, to kind of share that workload with me. But, for now, I'm the packer and the developer and creator.”

Though she has goals for that larger scale, Ninan said it’s not her dream to scale this business out as big and fast as possible. A subscription model, for example, is something the company doesn’t currently offer, although Ninan said she would like to in the future. For now, her main hope for the business lies elsewhere.

“My goal, I guess, is to have brand recognition. I want moms to hear WonderMom Box, and I want them to know what we're about,” Ninan said. “I'm not the kind of person who wants to cut corners and do things quick as possible, cheap as possible. That's not my goal. I want quality products, I want meaning to it. I want intention in everything that I put together. It takes time, because I'm really trying to put the effort behind it. So I really want that brand recognition.”

When asked what the most rewarding thing about running her business has been so far, Ninan said it was the feedback from moms, like her, who got to enjoy spending some quality time with their little ones.

“It's really the moms reaching out to me…I've actually had a lot of moms reaching out to me, out of the blue, when they get their boxes. They find me, or maybe we're in contact, and they just tell me how wonderful it was, how excited their little one was, like ripping things out of the box, and just having fun,” Ninan said. “As a mom, I love that with my own children, so I love that I can give other households that. If the kids are happy, you know mom is happy, the house is happy, and I just love that.”

Ninan said her daughter is four years-old now, and learning handwriting in school. Thanks to the work she did with her mom, she’s apparently picking it up pretty quickly. In the future, Ninan said she hoped other kids might be able to learn these crucial life skills by interacting with a WonderMom Box, the way her daughter did.

“They think they're just playing with different activities, touching different supplies, doing whatever it is. And they're learning all these skills,” Ninan said. “That's really gonna help them later on, as they develop and they learn different skills. Even handwriting, it helps a lot, having that early hand eye coordination and having that tactile movement. It goes a long way as kids go to school and they continue their development.”