Moms on the Move with Linda Swain

Alyssa Dver

A Day at the Ballpark for This Mom Hits Home the Need For a Child Safety Product Line

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by Laura Smith Bonner

The Red Sox are playing at venerable Fenway Park in Boston. It’s an old stadium and the concessions are located underneath the stands in a very dark, crowded and almost frightening area. Alyssa Dver winds her way through the busy throng of spectators that line the dank corridors, while clutching the sweaty palms of her three year-old son and her sundress-clad niece. All at once it occurs to her, “maybe I’m just an ignorant mother, but I don’t know what I were to do if I were to lose one of these guys.” Dver thought, “What would I do if one of them were to get lost and what should they do? And I really almost felt ashamed that I didn’t know what to do.” So I scribbled on a piece of paper my cell phone number and I put it in my son’s shorts, all the while thinking that if he were to get lost, he’d probably be crying and hysterical and might not remember about the number in his pocket. And her niece was wearing a sundress and sandals. Where could she possibly tuck an emergency number? As one might expect, they got through the game without incident; however, the memory of that panic-stricken moment stuck solidly with Dver, and the seeds of what would eventually become a line of family-friendly products aimed at helping keep children safe were firmly planted and the mission for Wander Wear had begun.

Dver’s ballpark episode is a scenario that could play quite easily in any one of our lives. We take our children to stadiums, to malls, to Disney World, to a myriad of places where there are tons of people milling about and kids get lost all the time. After some research on this issue, Alyssa began to realize that the number of children that do get lost is staggering. The Department of Justice published a report that calculates there are approximately 2000 kids a day that get lost. For Dver, this frightening statistic brought up a potent thought, “What do people do?”

For the next two years, Dver began research and survey work on this issue in any spare time she could find, all the while keeping a close eye on the market. But it was after she had her second child that the issue of what to do when you lose a child and how can we prevent or minimize the effects of such an incident became profoundly and clearly magnified. Dver states, “People with a single child, you can’t imagine losing your child. It’s not until you have the second one when all of a sudden it’s like, of course I’m going to lose one. It just happens.”

At the time of this epiphany, Dver was well-established and working full-time in a software marketing career. She also had several other businesses that she was managing, frequently lectured, wrote free-lance for a variety of national and regional publications, and tried to also work in time to move the software book she published in 2003 through the market. She was continuing with the course of her life, but found that this mission of Wander Wear was forever in the background and the idea of the business kept pulling at her. She states, (I knew that) “this was such an opportunity in two respects. One is that it’s pervasive: there’s not a single person, caregiver, parent, teacher or whomever that cannot relate to this issue of lost children. This problem crosses all races, ages and cultures.” So this appealed to her as a business opportunity, but inevitably, it became more of a life balance solution. Dver relates, “As a software professional, I liked what I had done for twenty some odd years and I earned a great salary, but I never felt much fulfilled by what I did. And it was so hard once I had kids and I had to travel, to be getting on that plane and look the children in the eyes and say ‘Mommy will be back in two days’. I hated that, it was absolutely torturous for me. So what I found was that this was an opportunity to really do something that was important to me, to the world and what really was nice was that my kids (could) understand it.”

At this point Dver found that she was struggling with the incongruities of her life. She states, “For a really long time I said to myself there’s got to be something more than a paycheck out there”. She was turning 40, she had two kids and her husband had just left a retail management career and went back to school to be a teacher. She knew instinctively that it was a lousy time financially for her to attempt this business. She continues, “But I really wanted to do it and I knew doing Wander Wear would make me internally happy. Whether it could make me financially happy was another thing.” With all of her previous business experience, Dver had a good sense that it was a great opportunity, but we all know there are no guarantees.

The turning point for Dver came when she decided to attend her first ever Wharton School Alumni meeting in Boston. In retrospect she believes she may have been searching for an external stimulus, and that is exactly what she managed to find. A chance meeting led to a manuscript being sent to her written by Lawler Kang called Passion at Work: A book whose entire premise revolved around understanding on a spiritual, psychological as well as a business level just what it was that you love to do for a career. Dver found it to be a tremendously inspirational book, which seemed to be tailor-made for her. She became friends with the author and while meeting with him and still questioning the viability of how she could walk away from her well-paying job, Kang eventually uttered the words that set her in motion. “Why are you asking? It’s so clear what you should do. It’s a matter of priorities, figure it out.”

It took the next six to nine months to really figure the whole puzzle out, but Dver left her executive software job last December, and as of January 2006, Wander Wear and its mission has been kicked into high gear. From the durable Parent Locator Tag, to the brightly colored line of shirts and hats, to the more intensive technical line of products, Wander Wear has a full line of products designed to help keep children safe. Although there have been countless challenges both before and after this eventual kick-off, the passion that was borne of the panic she felt that long ago afternoon at Fenway carries her through to this day.

Dver states, “Passion is an over-used word. When people feel that something is important to them, they feel passionate about it. I think that if you’re going to run a company and take that time and energy away from other things that you can do, whether it’s raise your children, being more participative at school, or being a better wife… or whatever it is that you could be doing otherwise, you really have to make conscious choices about where that passion lays.” She continues, “This is a mission for me; it’s that deep for me inside my soul. People will say to me, why don’t you go get a job, because there are days that I worry (about) how am I going to pay the bills? How am I going to pay the mortgage tomorrow?” So when people say, why don’t you go get a job? “I think to myself, I’d rather die. It’s not a matter of not being willing to work, on the contrary it seems like I work 100 hours a day. It’s a matter of being able to be home for my kids, or go to their school when I can, to have that flexibility. It’s doing the work that I know is important for other children, keeping them safe. It’s something that I feel great about doing.” Dver concludes, “The things that I do for this business are all things that I love to do…..and that passion is so important because that’s what gets me through the tough times.”

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