How This Mom Built a 7-Figure Diaper Bag Brand From Her Apartment

What do you do when the product you need simply doesn’t exist?

Alexandra Rutkay is the founder of Citymouse, a diaper bag brand that’s generated almost $2 million in sales in just a few years.

Before this, she was a serial side hustler who’d dabbled in jewelry, print on demand, and Amazon FBA, including one Amazon product she sank $8,000 into and had to liquidate.

The idea for Citymouse came from her own frustration. Heading to dinner with her husband and toddler son, she couldn’t find a bag that fit her diapers, wipes, and bottle without looking like a bulky, traditional diaper bag. So she decided to make one herself.

With no design background, she sketched a rough concept and brought it straight to Alibaba to find a bag manufacturer.

After a few failed samples, she ordered 500 units for close to $10,000, against her husband’s advice to stop investing in new products.

Tune in to Episode 769 of the Side Hustle Show to learn:

how to go from a rough sketch to a manufactured product without design experience
how to use preorders and organic TikTok content to fund inventory before it even lands
how to use AI agents to run ads, PR outreach, and daily business coaching as a side hustle

How the First Product Came Together

Alex’s first sample from the Alibaba manufacturer was “completely wrong,” too small, and the manufacturer itself questioned what it was even for.

She was 2 or 3 samples in before she landed on a design worth producing. She found her manufacturer by emailing 3 to 5 factories at once and going with whoever responded fastest and best understood her concept — a woman who related to her as a fellow mom.

Rather than researching competitor reviews or following a traditional product-research process, Alex leaned on her own intuition as a mom.

The closest existing product she’d found before launching was a discontinued Baby Bjorn clamshell bag — otherwise, nothing like it existed.

How She Pre-Sold Inventory Before It Arrived

While waiting on her first production run, Alex posted rough, unpolished TikTok videos talking about the bag and why she made it.

She hit her target audience of moms directly, and when people started asking where to buy it, she put the bag up for preorder on a basic Shopify site built with bartered photography and models.

That first run of 500 units took about 3 and a half months to sell through, helping fund the launch before inventory even landed.

She credits part of her early traction to timing: TikTok was in its “heyday” in late 2022, pushing videos out widely, and moms naturally share products that make their lives easier.

How PR and Press Built Credibility

Early on, some customers questioned whether Citymouse was even a real brand.

A publicist who’d worked with a major baby brand reached out, offering to do outreach within a budget Alex was comfortable with. That work landed early press and backlinks in outlets like Motherly, building trust for a brand that, at the time, only had a social media presence.

Alex’s approach to pitching: craft a story journalists want to read, not just about the product. She leans into personal details — she’s a cancer survivor and on her sixth business attempt — and keeps pitches short and concise.

The Numbers Behind the Business

Citymouse did about $136,000 in sales its first year, 2023.

Alex says the brand builds in healthy margins, roughly a 5x markup over cost, a lesson learned from past businesses where she didn’t leave room to grow as costs increased.

The current flagship “Classic” bag started at around $73 and now sells for $79. 2024 was the brand’s biggest year yet, though growth hasn’t been linear — spikes drop back to baseline as the algorithms and platform ownership shift.

The $50K Viral Moment

One of the wildest stretches in the business came when a publicist-gifted bag to a larger influencer and an organic viral customer post hit on the same day.

The result: $50,000 in sales in under 3 days, and a sellout that forced the brand onto preorder. Alex has been caught off guard by virality before, including once while on vacation in Portugal with no cell service.

Inventory forecasting remains one of the toughest ongoing challenges. Alex currently stores inventory in her apartment and storage units and is actively considering a move to a fulfillment center.

How the Product Line Has Expanded

Alex built her product decisions directly from customer feedback in TikTok comments and group chats.

When women kept asking for a bag with wipe access, she created the Park Bag, inspired by the popularity of Baggu-style crossbody bags, with wipe access built into the front.

It’s now Citymouse’s bestseller, though it’s also been widely copied.

Rather than pursue design patents, Alex has chosen to focus on brand-building instead, pointing to Sara Blakely’s approach with SPANX as inspiration: defending a design patent often isn’t worth the time, since competitors can skirt it with small changes.

A cargo bag, launched about a month before this recording, was her first official full product launch and, she says, exhausting.

Retail, Wholesale, and Amazon

Citymouse is now sold on Nordstrom.com and another retailer’s website via drop-ship arrangements, meaning Citymouse ships directly to the customer without the retailer holding inventory.

Getting there took persistence: Alex first pitched a buyer who passed, kept building the brand, did the NY NOW trade show to get into 10 small retailers, and finally landed the .com deal years later, right before that buyer was let go from the company.

Alex is also in the process of onboarding more products onto Amazon, currently selling just one SKU there, and plans to stick with Fulfilled by Merchant rather than FBA going forward.

How AI Agents Help Run the Business

Alex uses Claude-based AI agents to help run large parts of the business, including:

analyzing Meta ad performance daily
flagging wins and losses
acting as a daily business coach tied to her goals
handling PR outreach (which landed her a feature on entrepreneur.com)
and assisting with wholesale and operations tasks

She still reviews and edits the output herself, but says it has “completely leveled the playing ground” for her as a solo operator.

For product photography, she uses ChatGPT and Nano Banana to clean up backgrounds and make photos look professionally shot, saving thousands of dollars on photo shoots.

Tools/Tech

Shopify — website and ecommerce platform, including Collabs for affiliate/creator partnerships
Klaviyo — email marketing
Claude — AI agents for ads analysis, PR outreach, business coaching, and operations
ChatGPT and Nano Banana — AI photo editing for product shots
NewBook Models — a model website for finding photo shoot models by area and budget
Intro — paid coaching sessions with established entrepreneurs in D2C and ecommerce
Ecommerce Equation — a course Alex took to learn how to run her own Meta and Google ads

Mistakes or Surprises?

Alex has dealt with product quality issues, including items breaking or coming undone in shipping, challenges she says are hard to prepare for.

Customer service was difficult enough that it became her first hire.

And even with a now-stable business, she admits the fear of spending large sums on inventory never fully goes away: “I still get a pit in my stomach every time I have to spend a lot of money.”

What’s Next for Alex

Alex wants Citymouse to grow beyond the mom niche into a widely recognized bag brand, pointing to how Uniqlo’s crossbody bag went mainstream as the kind of appeal she’s aiming for rather than a luxury positioning.

She’s also working on marketing to a younger, Gen Z audience of upcoming mothers and hopes to eventually hire enough support to take Citymouse full-time and step back from her demanding day job in entertainment.

Alex’s #1 Tip for Side Hustle Nation

“Feel the fear and do it anyway. Just because you’ve failed in the past doesn’t mean that the next one isn’t the one that’s going to hit. So just keep going.”

Episode Links

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