The teacher needs a gift. Your kid needs a Halloween costume. You haven’t made a dentist appointment in a year. And you’re pretty sure someone just used the last roll of paper towels.
None of those tasks is particularly monumental on its own. Put them together with work, school schedules, activities, meals, laundry, and the approximately 700 other things bouncing around a parent’s brain, though, and suddenly even buying a birthday gift can feel like one task too many.
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That’s where Margaret Mallin comes in. Mallin recently launched The Mom Concierge STL, after spending about a year doing personal assistant work and informally helping people with tasks. The St. Louis mother of three offers exactly what the name suggests: Parents tell her what they don’t have time to do, and she handles it. That might mean shopping for and wrapping a gift, delivering supplies to a child’s school, ordering stationery, making a phone call to schedule an appointment, or picking up an item that a parent doesn’t have time to grab.
One recent request was about as straightforward as it gets. A client told Mallin that her husband was busy, and she couldn’t leave the office. “I need paper towels,” Mallin recalls her saying. “Just get me paper towels, and have them on my doorstep when I get home.”
Consider it DoorDash for the random tasks occupying valuable real estate in your brain, Mallin says with a laugh.
It started with one busy mom
The idea came partly from Mallin’s sister. Mallin stays home with her three children, ages 6, 5, and 2, while also doing hair and makeup on the side. Through that work, she regularly heard moms talk about how much they were juggling. Her sister offered an even closer look: Both she and her husband work full-time, and she sometimes asked Mallin to take care of errands that she couldn’t squeeze into the workday. Maybe her baby suddenly needed formula or diapers. Maybe she remembered a teacher Christmas gift that hadn’t been purchased.
“Can I pay you to go run to Target for me?” Mallin remembers her asking.
Eventually, a pattern emerged. “Everybody’s overscheduled, overwhelmed, and just needs that help,” Mallin says.
So after roughly a year of doing similar personal-assistant work, she gave the idea a name and officially launched The Mom Concierge STL this month.
So what can you actually outsource?
The short answer: quite a bit. Gift buying is one of Mallin’s most common requests. Recently, a client realized that after her sister-in-law welcomed a baby four months earlier, buying gifts for the baby and siblings was still on her to-do list. So Mallin handled it.
Clients can be as involved, or uninvolved, as they want. Someone ordering a teacher gift might give her precise instructions: Buy a $100 Visa gift card, put it in a card with this handwritten message, and then deliver it to my house or the school. Or the instructions might simply be: Here’s $30. Pick something for my kid’s friend’s birthday.
Most requests are quickly handled by sending Mallin a text. She can also make appointment calls, order personal items, shop locally, handle pickups, and make deliveries. Essentially, they’re the little tasks that have to get done eventually but can be surprisingly difficult to squeeze into an already packed day.
And Mallin has learned that sometimes simply making the decision is part of what a client wants to outsource. When she’s selecting a more personal item such as a gift, she’ll typically run her idea by the client before buying it.
The holidays are a whole different beast
If there’s one season tailor-made for a mom concierge, Mallin says, it’s the holidays.
Between teacher gifts, neighbor gifts, Christmas cards, wrapping, and all of the other details that families pile into December, she says, holiday help could practically be a business of its own.
For holiday cards, for example, clients can hand over the cards and let Mallin stuff, address, stamp, and prepare them. She also offers Christmas gift wrapping.
And she’s already seeing interest. “The mental load of the holidays really is a large part of what I help with,” she says.
Mallin thinks some of that load comes from the growing pressure parents feel to make seemingly every occasion special. “We want to do it all, and realistically, nobody has that kind of time,” she says.
She remembers smaller holiday such as Valentine’s Day being considerably simpler when she was growing up. “We didn’t get a basket for Valentine’s Day,” she says. “My parents said, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day,’ and that was it.”
Now, she says, it can feel as though every holiday, classroom event, birthday, and family occasion comes with another round of things parents are expected to buy, create, or remember.
“We don’t have time for hobbies or anything for ourselves anymore because we’re always trying to make every little detail so perfect,” she says.
‘But you don’t have to’
Of course, paying someone else to buy the teacher gift or wrap the birthday present may bring up another feeling familiar to parents: guilt. After all, you could technically do it yourself. Mallin’s response: “But you don’t have to.”
For parents who genuinely enjoy making elaborate holiday magic or hunting down the perfect birthday gift, she isn’t trying to take that away. Mallin herself enjoys doing those things for her own kids.
But not every parent does, and even those who do don’t necessarily have time for all of it. “You wanna go on a walk with a friend instead of getting the perfect costume or the perfect gift for so-and-so?” she says. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
And for a parent who wants their child to participate in a tradition but doesn’t personally enjoy putting it together, outsourcing can be another way to make it happen.
How much does a mom concierge cost?
The Mom Concierge STL offers both à la carte services and memberships. To inquire about task-based pricing, send Mallin a direct message on Instagram. For an individual gift request, for example, the client pays for the gift itself plus Mallin’s service and any extras. Mallin says gift wrapping typically runs about $5, delivery generally ranges from $5–$15 depending on location, and the service itself might be around $20. On the low end, she says, a client could expect to spend about $30 in fees on top of the cost of the gift.
Memberships are designed for families who need help more regularly. At the highest level Mallin described, a client can request six services during a month.
Those don’t have to be spread evenly across four weeks. A family approaching a trunk-or-treat, for example, might ask Mallin to handle decorations and candy as one service and order the kids’ costumes as another, leaving four requests for later in the month.
A school suddenly needs tissues? Send Mallin a text. Need someone to call around for a same-day appointment? That can be another.
Could the mom concierge become a house manager?
Eventually, Mallin would like to expand the concept. She envisions other parents, including stay-at-home moms looking for flexible side work, helping fulfill errands and requests.
She’d also like The Mom Concierge STL to eventually offer more of a house-management service. Instead of simply picking up a Target or grocery order, for instance, someone could bring it into the home and put everything away. Laundry and other household tasks could potentially become part of the service, too.
“I would love to be able to do a Target pickup or Container Store pickup and be able to put it into the house,” Mallin says. “Imagine coming home from work or a trip to find the groceries already in the fridge and everything where it belongs.”
For now, though, it’s Mallin, her car, and whatever happens to be on a St. Louis parent’s to-do list that day.
Sometimes that’s a thoughtfully assembled baby gift. Sometimes it’s teacher presents and Halloween costumes. And sometimes, it’s just paper towels.
For parents with a dozen tabs open in their brains at all times, getting to close even one of them is the whole point. “Moms are superheroes. We all want to do it all and make every detail perfect,” Mallin says. “But we can’t do it all alone. With the right support system, however, maybe we can get closer.”
