This story is featured in the November Minnesota Valley Business magazine. To subscribe, call Free Press reader services at 625-4451.

Customers who stop in to Sweet Peas on Riverfront can be fairly confident the products they’ll find there are the kinds of things parents — and their children — will want.

The three owners are all mothers, with a total of nine children, ranging in age from almost 11 to not quite 1, between them. Two or three of those kids are often present at the store during business hours — and those kids have tested the inventory of toys intensively. They push around the shopping cart, cook in the toy kitchen and play with the wooden train set. “You can be sure that everything is safe,” says Diane Winegar. “Our kids have tested all of it.”

In most cases, so have they. The three owners — Winegar, Julie Brewer and Kristina Sorenson — only stock merchandise they have either used themselves or would have used if it had been available when their kids were younger. “We haven’t ordered anything that any of us wouldn’t have used,” Sorenson says. “Plus, these are a lot of the things that we were looking for that we couldn’t find locally.”

There was a time when many of the products that Sweet Peas stocks weren’t available in Mankato. Although the local big-box department stores carry most of the baby basics, from bottles and bibs to strollers and cribs, few specialty items can be found on their shelves. People looking for unique baby gifts or specific name-brand products often had to take their shopping to the Twin Cities.

That’s why Erica Koser, the business’s founder and original owner, started Sweet Peas six years ago. It’s also why Brewer, Sorenson and Winegar purchased the business from her earlier this year.

Koser originally opened the store in a small strip mall just off of Madison Avenue, then moved it to a site at the intersection of Riverfront Drive and Madison Avenue three years ago. Her move south on Riverfront last January coincided too closely with the city’s decision to widen Riverfront Drive and add parking lanes to the road. As the hubbub of road construction slowed sales, Koser decided she needed to back away from the all-consuming task of running a retail operation to spend more time with her husband and their four kids. Brewer, who had worked for Koser for more than four years and who had been the manager for the past three years, stepped in to save Sweet Peas.

“I knew that if someone didn’t purchase it, it would go away,” Brewer says. “And it’s too good a thing for Mankato to lose.”

So Brewer thought about who she could partner with to purchase the store. She and Sorenson had both been nannies several years ago and had stayed close through parenthood. Winegar, who had been neighbors with Sorenson, had chosen Brewer to take care of her boys on Sorenson’s recommendation. “Kristina and I had been friends for a long time, so she was a logical choice,” Brewer says. “And I knew that Diane had just quit her job to stay home. So I mentioned it to her as well.”

The three of them laugh that even together, they’ve been overwhelmed by the rigors of running the business — even a business that was already established when they took it over. “We had such a good base to walk into and we’re still overwhelmed,” Brewer says. “Erica started this from scratch. I have no idea how she did it all on her own.”

“This was already a great business when we took over,” adds Sorenson. “What we walked into is really a gift.”

Winegar hopes the focus the owners place on their own families will make other families feel more comfortable in the store as well. Photos of their children, including a large group shot of everyone together, hang on the walls throughout the store. And, of course, the younger children come to the store with their moms during the day as well.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do this if we had to put our kids in day care,” Winegar admits. “But we hope that seeing the kids playing happily here will make other people with kids more at ease when they come in. They see our kids running around, touching things, and they know that their kids are safe here.”