AI Empowers us to Compete on a Level Playing Field With Much Bigger Companies

3C: Tell us about Sarah Wells Bags. When and why did you start it, and how has it grown?

SW: In 2011, after my first daughter was born, I needed a stylish bag for carrying a breast pump and keeping milk fresh. I spent weeks looking for something, but there just wasn’t anything on the market. I realized that millions of other moms had the same need — so I decided to launch my own business, Sarah Wells Bags, in 2013. 

Early in 2026, I actually stepped aside from day-to-day operations so I could focus on advocating around issues affecting working families. But I’m still very involved in the business, which is thriving. We offer a wide range of bags and backpacks, as well as high-quality nursing and pumping products. We only have four full-time employees, but generate millions of dollars in sales every year. Our products are available on about a dozen digital platforms, including Amazon, Target, Walmart, Babylist, and our own website. 

3C: How does Sarah Wells Bags use AI? 

SW: Well, we really use AI-powered tools to help fill critical gaps we couldn’t otherwise afford to fill. That means we suddenly have really sophisticated capabilities that — until now — have only been available to much bigger businesses.

Here’s a good example. We use an AI-powered financial management tool called Finaloop that not only does our bookkeeping, but also manages our balance sheet and gives us sales projections and inventory estimates. It’s integrated with our sales platforms, so it can also give us real-time updates on our margins and alert us to issues like changes in shipping speeds or costs. It’s like we suddenly have a whole finance team led by an amazing CFO. Honestly, it’s been imperative to have that tool in place over the past year or so, given all the chaos and uncertainty with costs and supply chains. And it costs just a fraction of what we used to pay for bookkeeping services. 

3C: Wow. Do you use any other AI-powered tools? If so, how do they help you?

SW: We also use AI to help with sales-tax compliance. For small e-commerce businesses like mine, managing state and local sales taxes across the country is incredibly complicated. In the past, we either had to hire expensive firms to track and manage everything for us, or try to handle things on our own, manually. It was a huge headache.

But now we have a tool that can track our sales data and automatically calculate what we owe across jurisdictions. The tools can interpret the data and apply complex rules in ways that our small team really struggled with. So it saves us so much time and stress. 

3C: We talk to a lot of small-business owners who say they’re using AI tools to help with marketing. Do you do that, too?

SW: Yes. We recently started using an AI-powered marketing tool called Blaze.ai to help with our creative work. We gave it 14 years of our marketing materials and trained it to write in our voice and incorporate our messaging. Now it helps us draft a huge portion of our social media content. We still set the strategy and make the final editorial decisions, but it allows us to produce valuable content much faster than we’ve ever been able to. And it costs less than $100 a month. 

We also use Amazon’s AI-powered tools to monitor our performance, manage ads, and optimize listings across dozens of products. That helps us find really interesting, actionable insights within platform data. Again, there’s no way we could do that kind of analytics on our own, nor could we afford to hire an analyst with that kind of expertise. 

3C: If you could sit down and talk with policymakers, what would you tell them about AI and small businesses?

SW: For years, we’ve been asking for tools that level the playing field by helping us process and analyze data, make compliance easier, and allow us to really compete. Now, finally, those tools are here. 

I know that AI-powered technologies come with risks and downsides, and that AI needs guardrails. But lawmakers need to be really thoughtful as they design those guardrails. Because for small businesses like mine, AI does so much more than just save time and cut costs. It empowers us to compete on a level playing field with much bigger companies — helping us grow, succeed, and serve our community of breastfeeding parents.

Learn more about Sarah Wells Bags at sarahwellsbags.com.