How A Terrible Day Spawned a $70 Million Business

Megan Tamte was living her lifelong dream of motherhood - and she was miserable. Launching a store for other mothers turned everything around.

- David Whitford

WHERE WERE YOU on the night of May 21, 2003? Here’s a guess: in your living room, on your couch, among the 38.1 million viewers watching the season two finale of American Idol. That program is now winding down its 15-season run, but the second year’s last show was its peak—the most watched episode in series history. The one when Ruben Studdard edged out Clay Aiken. Do you remember?

Megan Tamte will never forget. She was a young housewife then, barely 30, living in Concord, California, with her handsome, hard-working husband, Mike, and her two beautiful children, Allison and Ryan. Motherhood was her calling, and she believed in her heart that she was happy. Except that lately there had been rumblings.

Persistent insomnia, tears she couldn’t stanch, too much reality TV. “Mike would come home from work and I would be crying, and I didn’t really know why,” she says. “It just felt very weird, because I loved being a mom. I was in love with my kids, and I loved taking care of them. But there was something else going on. There was something else that wasn’t quite right.”

She managed to keep up a brave face during the day; her children were oblivious. But at night, it was all she could do to collapse on the couch and switch on the TV. American Idol, Big Brother, Survivor—hour after hour, night after night, and it was never enough.

Until, one night, there was Ruben Studdard, in his hour of triumph. Closing the show with an emotional cover of a U.K. hit single, “Flying Without Wings.” “You’ve got to fight for every dream,” he sang in a cloud of swirling confetti, “’Cause who’s to know which one you let go/Would have made you complete…”