Another small business takes a hit in this economy.

I was thinking of getting into the fashion designer business -- specifically, the maternity fashion designer business. It seemed easy enough to me: Just take a lot of material, preferaly with a dorky flower pattern on it, and then sew it into a roughly-tent-shaped pattern, and voila, maternity clothes.

That's what it appeared to me that maternity clothes designers did, judging by the maternity clothes that Sweetie always wore, and the ones I've seen worn by friends and coworkers and people on the street.

So this morning, I was all set to begin my new and totally easy career, and I thought "I'll just check out where I'm going to be selling these tents... I mean maternity clothes," and I come across this website called "Kiki's Fashions Maternity."

Dang, was all I thought. This site blew my plans out of the water. They had not tents, but actual stylish maternity clothes, things that pregnant women could wear and still look good. Like this:



What's the deal with that? There's no dumb floral pattern. It's not shapeless. It's not drab and baggy and dumpy. How am I supposed to compete with that?

Then I find out, too, that Kiki's will give you 20% off on clothes just for reading about them on my blog -- all you have to do is enter the coupon code blogfriends at checkout -- and, well, that was it: My career as a maternity fashion designer was dead in the water.

So while you're over shopping for trendy, cool, hip, fashionable, neat, inexpensive maternity clothes at Kiki's, I will be figuring out what to do with 20,000 square feet of floral-patterned burlap.