West Bloomfield Mom Creates Website to Share Kid Quotes

Art Teacher: DRAW ANYTHING you’d like today in class — pirates, spaceships, forests, rainbows. (Stopping at one student’s desk) What are you drawing?

Student: I’M DRAWING GOD

Art Teacher: Well, sweetie, NO ONE KNOWS WHAT GOD LOOKS LIKE.

Student: THEY WILL IN A MINUTE.

This is one of Andrea Sherr’s favorite quotes on her Heard on the Playground website, www.heardontheplayground.com.

The site, launched in January, is free and anonymous. Anyone can post stories and visitors can send e-cards with funny kid quotes and children’s artwork that has been posted on the site, or upload their own images.

The site also features custom printed t shirts. Visitors can pick a shirt color, quote, font and color, and even customize text for $19.99. Shirts come in adult and child sizes. The two-tone vintage tees are printed by Brody’s in West Bloomfield Township, then sent directly to the customer.

Sherr, of West Bloomfield, laughs and says her husband Roger’s only question is, “What is your revenue model?”

“I’m not looking to commercialize it,” she said. “It’s a labor of love. It’s word of mouth. This isn’t some big commercial marketing scheme.”

She smiles and adds, “It doesn’t hurt if it’s successful.”

Sherr originally thought of compiling a book of funny kid sayings because kids say the darndest things," but says, “it seemed better suited for the Internet.” She noted that she was getting stories “from nationwide, as well as locally.” 

Marketing consultant Hilary Rubin said, “I fell in love with the site.

“My main marketing effort is geared toward bringing people to the site — basically, driving traffic,” Rubin said. “I like to target moms with blogs because they have the most amazing community on the Web. Mom Bloggers have been instrumental in helping us gain more traffic.”

Sherr’s inspiration comes from her three kids, Mitchell, 9, Valerie, 6, and Spencer, 2. They also are the primary challenge of running a home-based business — working with her kids around.

“There are times when my daughter’s writing on my arm. My son’s climbing on my head. You really have to find time.”

Sherr said she sometimes works from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m.

“Being CEO of my company, I have to work everything in,” she said. “I try to get five hours. I’d like to put in more, but my children come first.”

Rubin wrote in an e-mail from Israel, where she lives, “Working with Andrea is phenomenal! She’s a fantastic businesswoman who knows what she wants and goes for it. She also puts her kids first — which is important to me.”

Sherr’s programmer Mike Sajid, of iStartUs in Phoenix, usually works on more commercial-oriented sites.

“As a parent, it was fun for me to do it,” he said, noting Sherr “thinks from a mom point of view.”

“She was passionate about making a fun site for people to come in and interact with each other,” Sajid said.

Sherr grew up in Grand Blanc. She has a law degree and master’s in business from Suffolk University in Boston. She worked as a paralegal in Washington, D.C., prior to law school. Afterward, she worked as a marketing consultant in Boston. “I had a mid-life crisis at 29. I decided to be a physical therapist,” she said. She met her husband when she returned to Michigan to get her bachelor’s degree in physical therapy from Oakland University.

Sherr describes the website as one of the checked-off items on her life’s to-do list. The list includes scuba diving, jumping out of a plane, running a marathon, having kids and now, starting a business.

About Heard on the Playground, Sherr said: “This is the next chapter in my life, I guess.”