Meet Eliza Ward, the co-founder of Chefshop.com , who is  Mompreneur of the week.  As a Stanford MBA and Microsoft retiree, she has found that her love of food is a passion that keeps she and her husband Tim Mar moving this  tremendously successful online business forward.  It’s all about the food ~ read more and visit Chefshop.com to see what they offer!

Tell us about ChefShop.com.

ChefShop.com does two things really.  First, we sell gourmet foods and hard-to-find ingredients online. However, our primary focus is to support small artisan food producers and growers.  Many of the best food producers produce in such small volumes that they do not have the ability to distribute their products through the regular grocery or even specialty food channels.  We actively seek out these types of small producers and promote them and sell their products.  Mostly, because we want them to survive and keep making their products.  After all, what would the world be if all our products came from Kraft or Oscar Meyer?

What was it that made you want to start the business?

Mostly the love of good food.  My husband and I had no experience in the food business before launching chefshop.com — although we had a lot of friends who had experience in food.  I came from High Tech marketing and Tim was a professional still and film photographer.  Not a bad combination – really – considering that we launched ChefShop.com when the Internet was still young and no one really had any experience in it.

How do you find customers?

We rely primarily on PR, search engine results, pay-per-click advertising on Google, and a weekly newsletter. Our original ecommerce site was on Yahoo Store — so most of our first customers came from Yahoo.  Also, a few of our original customers came from Mauny’ s Kitchen on MSN.  And they followed us over.  Most of our growth has continued that way – through word of mouth.  We periodically experiment with advertising — but it has never really been worth the cost.

What has changed about your business over the 10 years since you launched Chefshop?

Our business has changed a lot since its start.  More products. Better products.  Closer connections with the producers and customers.  Our original business strategy was to launch the site and then get purchased.  But with the DotCom bust, we had to re-think that strategy.  That is really when we got to our “soul” — and since then our mojo has been building — slowly over time.  We refocused on high-end small producers and growers that really cared about what they were doing.  Future plans are to grow to the point that Tim and I can make a decent living and then keep going.

What has been your biggest challenge with your business?

Over all our biggest ongoing challenge is getting everything done that we need to – both at work and at home – within the time and budget that we have.  Our biggest single challenge was my illness last spring.  We are still feeling the wake of that — from having our daughter in home school to trying to get our son into a proper kindergarten. When both husband and wife are in a small business, you learn that you are very vulnerable to events that are out of you control.  Thank goodness we had good health insurance, otherwise we would be bankrupt now.

What’s your best advice to give someone else who wants to start their own business?

Make sure you are doing it for passion, not for the money.  Because it is A LOT of work — the work never stops — so you better believe in what you are doing.  Also, I do not advise you to start a business with your spouse.  Besides that usual challenges and stresses, you are giving up a lot of security that you need.  So, one of you should be working outside the business.