About Life's Sweet

Life's Sweet's Founder and History

Like many successful entrepreneurs, Life’s Sweet founder and CEO Soraya Cartwright combined her business acumen with personal passion and marketplace need. What sets her apart is her extraordinary journey from Iran to the United States, navigating the worlds of education and business in a foreign country, alone and disadvantaged. It’s an improbable story that epitomizes the American dream.

Soraya could never have imagined how her life would turn out growing up in Rasht, Iran. In early 1979, when she was 18, her parents decided to send her and her 17-year-old brother to the United States to further their educations and escape the growing political unrest.

Soraya soon made her way to Colorado when a friend recommended a program at the Colorado Women’s College that could help her learn English quickly. Her lifestyle took a dramatic turn when she learned shortly after arriving that funds had been frozen between the Iran and the U.S., and the financial support she expected from her family would not be forthcoming. Soraya persevered, eventually able to obtain a loan for tuition; Soraya enrolled the University of Colorado Denver, where she received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1984. Her first full-time job was as a caller and cart runner at Pace Membership Warehouse in Aurora. Although her job was at the lowest rung on the corporate ladder, Soraya remained undiscouraged. She remembered the advice her father gave her at the airport in Tehran: “If you don’t like what you’re doing, don’t show it, and do it well.” Soraya followed that advice, but she also began to notice ways to improve employee and company performance. She was not shy about sharing her ideas with the company president, and soon rose through the ranks to become Director of Training and Development.

In 1993, Soraya joined the satellite television company EchoStar, where she worked for 10 years. Soraya grew with the company, rising to become Executive Vice President of EchoStar’s Dish Network, where she oversaw Marketing/programming, customer service operations and Human Resources. According to the Rocky Mountain News, she was the state’s fifth-highest-paid executive in 2003.

In January 2004, Soraya left the company. Both Pace and EchoStar had grown dramatically during her tenures, and she enjoyed being part of expanding companies. She wanted to incorporate the skills she’d developed into something new. She says. “I had a ton of aspirations to build something from scratch and grow it.”

The idea for Life’s Sweet was triggered by experiences in Soraya’s personal life. She loved spending time with her son, who was born in 2001. Determined to remember both the everyday and special moments of his childhood, she found herself taking hundreds of pictures, as well as keeping notes and mementoes. She wanted easy access to his well-documented life, but as a busy executive, she didn’t have time to organize the photos and other memories into albums or scrapbooks. She was surprised to find that in a world where professionals perform many of our daily chores – from dry cleaning our clothes to making our favorite lattes -- there were virtually no companies that organized and produced photo books.

Soraya created a business to solve this problem for herself and so many others like her, opening Life’s Sweet in July 2005 in Lone Tree, Colo. The company organizes and prints high-quality, customized photo books, DVDs set to music, and greeting cards. Its first year in business, Life’s Sweet won the $50,000 grand prize from the Photo Marketing Association International Awards for its innovative “Live Your Life Outside the Shoebox” promotional campaign. It is on a steady growth track, with plans to franchise in the near future.

Soraya is active in her son’s school and other community organizations. She serves on the board of the Denver/Boulder Better Business Bureau Foundation, which provides consumer education, grants the BBB Torch Award for Marketplace Trust, and awards the BBB Student of Integrity Scholarship.