Under the Radar:Aileen Howell had never intended to run her own business, but the reluctant entrepreneur has carved a niche for herself in the booming maternity and babywear market, writes Ciarán Brennan.

Although she says the idea of setting up on her own scared her, the business has thrived and this summer her company, Bumpbasics.com, marks its fourth year in existence.

Necessity was the mother of invention for Howell, who was frustrated during her own pregnancy at the lack of choice available to pregnant women who couldn't or didn't want to spend a fortune on maternity clothes.

"I did a lot of shopping online and, when I was pregnant, I tried to buy online but there was nobody at all in Ireland doing it," says the former software engineer.

"A lot of people in the country were in the same boat - if you wanted to buy maternity clothes, you headed into one of the cities for a day's shopping. When you have a big bump, you're very tired and you've got swollen ankles, the last thing you want is to start heading around Dublin in the middle of the summer."

That got Howell thinking about setting up her own internet business. However, with a baby on the way it was a slow burner.

When a plan worked out with her employer to work from home after her maternity leave fell through, Howell was faced with the prospect of daily commutes from her Co Louth home, plus the hassle of finding childcare. That prompted her to start working on the website for Bumpbasics.com.

But setting up an internet business is about more than creating a website - it involves setting up credit card processing systems, dealing with legalities of selling online, finding and hammering out agreements with suppliers and finding the best way of getting the goods to the customers.

While the temptation is to try to stock everything to suit every customer's needs, Howell said she deliberately started off small.

"I basically wanted to do a proof of concept, try it out," she says. "At that stage there was no money involved. Everything was done under my own labour.

"Doing the website, I used open source software so I didn't have to pay for that. I was lucky when I started that I wasn't in a position where I needed this to make an awful lot of money very quickly because I was still on maternity leave. I was able to let it take its own course. If it turned out to have been a disaster, it wouldn't have been the end of the world and I could have walked away.

"I know that I was very lucky in that regard; a lot of people wouldn't have been in that position."

She found a supplier with a range of clothes she liked and arranged to stock a few products on her website.

"Luckily they had very small minimum orders. Some people have ridiculous minimum orders. There is no way, starting off, that you would be able to afford to take €5,000 worth of stock."

Howell started off with just five items on sale and made her first sale in June 2004. Today, the site offers more than 200 products, ranging from maternity wear for work, home and going out to baby products and pregnancy health products.

The nature of maternity wear has changed dramatically over the past number of years, according to Howell. "Women want to wear the same stuff when they are pregnant as when they are not pregnant. A girl who goes round in jeans and tops all year round is not suddenly going to don a frock with a big bow on the front. People just want to wear regular clothes."

Bumpbasics.com has since developed into a clicks and bricks business. Demand from customers led Howell to consider setting up a shop and in October 2006, she acquired a site at Tullyallen in Drogheda, close to the M1 motorway. Again she took the start small approach.

"As the money comes in, increase the spend on it, but if nothing else treat it as a warehouse for stock and a place to work that happens to be a place where people can call in as well," she says.

"That's what we did and it has been a big success."

In fact, the entire business has been so successful that Howell has had a number of approaches to buy her out. So far she has resisted the temptation to sell up.

"I was looking at the figures and the figures were making too much sense to walk away. I would be walking away just as we were coming out of the initial lows and heading for the highs."