5 Small Business Ideas for Housewives

Rising inflation means it is becoming hard to run a household on a single income. Housewives can often find it hard to enter the traditional job market due to a lack of work experience, besides juggling family and work, which is no easy task.

Small-scale businesses are the way to go for housewives looking to expand their horizons. Here are some small, home-based business ideas for moms and married women.

1. Tailoring Business

Tailoring and sewing have been traditionally popular business ideas for married women. This is because it does not require you to leave your house, requires minimal investment and is easily marketable through word of mouth.

If you have sewing skills, you can initially practice by offering to work for friends, family and neighbours and then expand your business from there through referrals. Most women look for a dependable local tailor for alterations and dressmaking. They may tend to trust other women more.

You can also further expand the business through social media marketing by creating social media pages for your business and sharing your work to gain more customers and referrals. Your social media can also serve as your portfolio and will make it easier and more efficient for customers to share and recommend you to other potential clients.

2. Selling Home-made Crafts and Other Products

This is a business for housewives that is emotionally fulfilling and will bring some much needed extra income. Crafting and other creative work can be an incredibly satisfying way of spending your free time and, as a matter of fact, a lot of women already do craft work at home, either as a hobby or for gifting purposes. Well, why not make a business out of it?

Craftwork like macrame, crochet, embroidery, cross-stitch, etc., are incredibly popular for home decor. These days, homemade personal care and self-care products like scented candles, handmade soaps, bath bombs and jewellery are also very popular.  You can sell your work at local craft fairs and exhibitions. In addition, you can also open an online store either through social media or by creating a website where you can sell your work from home.

This is a small-scale business idea for housewives that can be done by oneself and does not require hiring employees or complicated inventory and management. Basic accounting and ledger management can easily be done digitally through apps like OkCredit that are optimised for small-home based businesses and do not require a lot of expertise and know-how.

3. Tutoring

If you don’t want a business where you have to worry about pricing and storage of goods then you can sell a service instead. Tutoring can be an ideal business idea for married women. This is an especially good home-based business idea for moms since you will be able to help and supervise your own kids’ studies in addition to those of your students. In fact, your kids can help you find students from among their friends and classmates.

Alternatively, you can also look for students through websites or social media. Since a lot of parents these days are working, they are unable to supervise and look after their kids’ studies and homework. They often look for qualified tuition teachers who can tutor their children and give them a break.

But academics is not the only area where you can offer tutoring services. If you have the artistic or crafting ability or have proficiency in art forms like dancing, singing or other musical arts, then you can offer to tutor young children or even adults in those arts. These days people are always looking to expand their children’s CVs through extra-curricular activities that help with college admissions and if you have the training and proficiency required then you can use that.

Tutoring is an excellent business for housewives since parents are trusting of other parents and mothers when it comes to their children.

4. Freelancing

Freelancing is another great business for housewives with large families or lots of responsibilities and duties, like taking care of elderly family members or young children. This is because it offers a lot of flexibility in terms of work hours and amount of work. Since you are essentially self-employed, you can determine the hours you work, the when and how much as well as the amount and kind of work you take on. This means that you can juggle household responsibilities and paid work efficiently and optimise the use of your time to the maximum, making it an ideal business idea for married women.

You can freelance in a number of fields. If you have held a job previously, you can freelance as a consultant in that field and lend your expertise to various firms and corporates whom you can charge appropriately for various projects.

You can also freelance as a content writer. This does not require any qualifications, although a degree in language, literature or communication is helpful but not necessary. You can be a high school graduate as long as you have a good command of the language you are looking to write in, with excellent grammar and writing skills. You will also need some knowledge of SEO and web-based content writing. A computer, an internet connection and a knowledge of word processing software are all you need to start freelancing online as a content writer.

5. Tiffin Service

This is a business for housewives that do not require any extra qualifications or training but builds on skills that they already have, namely cooking.

Home-cooked meals are in great demand, especially in cities with large populations of young migrants, either students or young working professionals. They often don’t have the time or skills to cook their meals for themselves but often crave a hearty and wholesome home-cooked meal.

You can offer your services to deliver healthy meals to people’s offices or homes. Marketing can be done by posting flyers and pamphlets near colleges and offices or through social media marketing and word of mouth. This can be a great business idea for married women, particularly if you have older kids who don’t need much supervising and own a vehicle that you can use to make deliveries.

It is also a business that can be easily scaled up as required by employing some cooking assistants and a few delivery persons to cater to a larger customer base. In that case, accounting and ledger management, as well as staff management, can get complicated. At that point, you could use apps like OkCredit for easy account management as well as OkStaff to manage your staff and look after their salaries, attendance among other things.

Also read:

1) Online Business Ideas You Can Start Quickly
2) What online business can I do to make money? Here are the top-6 ideas for you.
3) Where Do the Best Business Ideas Come From?
4) Best Home Business Ideas in 2020
5) OkCredit: All you need to know about OkCredit & how it works.

FAQs

Q. Why should I start a small business from home?

Ans. Financial independence is hard to come by for housewives. Small-scale business ideas for married women can give independence and confidence, besides adding a second source of income for the family in times of rising inflation.

Q. Do I need any qualifications for starting a home-based business?

Ans. In most cases, no. The benefit of being an entrepreneur and self-employed is that you don’t have to prove yourself to a boss or employer to start working. You are your own boss! You will need some skills depending on the kind of business you want to start but educational qualifications are not a necessity.

Q. How do I market my business?

Ans. Social media marketing, by creating a profile or page promoting your business and actively posting, sharing and promoting your work can be of great help. In addition, don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth marketing especially for small-scale, home-based businesses.

Q. Will, I need to hire employees for my home business?

Ans. It is entirely up to you whether or not to hire employees. Most small businesses can be managed by you alone or with the help of family and friends. If you do need to hire employees, apps like OkStaff can help you manage that aspect of your business smoothly as well.