Hello,

My name is Chen Peled Keinan.  Three and a half years ago, I lost my 15 month old baby girl, Sinai and my dearest mom Ruth in a terrorist attack in Petach Tikva, right in front of my and my husband’s eyes.  Three months later we left for the States and now live in Palo Alto, CA.  My husband’s company was kind enough to relocate us from Israel to here, where he continues to work for them in their Santa Clara headquarters.  We simply were too traumatized to remain in Israel and live a “normal” life.  Also, we couldn’t go on living in a place where every thing and every where reminded us of Sinai and mom.  The gaping hole of their absence would be forever present and grinding on our raw nerves.  We also lost the privilege of denial of “it won’t happen to me” – what would we tell our future kids and how would we justify it to ourselves if something was to happen to them in the future?  We had enough guilt to last us a lifetime over not being able to protect our baby girl – she depended on us and we failed her!  We live and she didn’t – and that’s a guilt no parent should have to experience.

So, here we are in Palo Alto, striving to make a life for ourselves with no family and no old friends but with each other’s support.  Our first mission was to have more kids so that we could see a little bit of Sinai in each one of them.  So now we have two additional, wonderful children, Roy who is two and a half and Neve who is 6 months.  That mission (until I regain my strength for more) is now behind me, I wanted to venture back out to working again.  I have worked all of my life until the day of the terrorist attack and then couldn’t, till now.  Going through something like I went, and still going through – life has pretty much lost its magic.  I live and carry on because that’s all I can do, but the colors are faded and the fight to wake up each morning and carry on with the day’s work is many times daunting.  I needed some adrenaline in my life to feel more alive and starting my own business after working for others, all of my life, seemed like a good idea.

Together with another Israeli mom who I met here and befriended, I have started my own business called CuteLittleMe.  www.cutelittleme.com is an online boutique that sells unique baby and kids clothing and gifts from size newborn to size 4.  Most of the clothes we carry are from top Israeli brands like Shilav and Mish mish.  I did all of the design and most of the coding.  In my new business I combine 3 passions in my life – kids, clothes and the internet, which I think is a great media.  I have been designing and building websites for 10 years, from websites I did pro bono to many “green” organizations to big and very complicated ecommerce and content sites.  So I had the internet experience but no business experience.  Still I believe that if CuteLittleMe survives its first year, which is the time it takes search engines like Google to index the website, and so allow it to appear in natural searches, it will make it big.

My main problem with the business now is bringing traffic in.  It’s very difficult and marketing is very expensive and many times not as effective as is believed to be.  We found out that the best marketing strategy is word of mouth and sending promotional emails to people who opted to join our mailing list.  But, it takes time to build up a client list and mailing list, time which we don’t have.  Since most of the clothes we sell are Israeli brands (in addition to Petit Bateau, Oink Baby, Tiny Love Toys and others), which are not so well branded, we find it very hard to attract customers to our store, so we need to sell most of the winter’s collection to have enough money to buy next season’s collection which will surely be more balanced in terms of the brands we carry.  To do that we really need to reach the Jewish Americans who hopefully, would love to own clothes from Israel, and by that support Israel.  We have been here too little a time to have a network of Jewish American friends and for that I am hesitantly approaching you.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could maybe mention us in your newsletter to your friends and family.  I feel they would like what our store has to offer and at very good prices.  I’ve never been comfortable receiving charity and thank the Lord, I was never in a spot where I just had to, but would love some help to help myself get back on my feet. I have never depended on anyone but myself and thought long and hard before I approached you, also because I am very careful about how I connect my personal tragedy with my business. I started my business in order to help me deal with the day to day grind of suffering such a great loss.  It is there to make my mom proud.  My business is to serve my mom and child, in their honor and not the other way round – that is why I am only going public in the framework of terror victims organizations.

Best regards,

Chen Peled Keinan.

My email: cpkeinan@yahoo.com

Website: www.cutelittleme.com