Back in 1994, Barbara Hobart was working in Los Angeles as a TV comedy writer / producer and during a hiatus she was puttering around her garage and inadvertently came up with a fun new way to decorate light switch plates for her new home. (Back then, decorative switchplates weren't even a "thing" -- much less a tangible product.) They were a hit with friends and while Barbara was still working as a writer, she hired a group of stay-at-home moms to make them and HomePlates was born. 

On the weekends, they made the rounds at craft shows, and soon the product took off.  Barbara began to sell them on a very basic website and then they made their way into stores.  (“Basic,” is an understatement… back then, her internet was still using dial up!)

In late 2003, while visiting friends in London, she offered to make them a switchplate to replace their plain, boring, white switch. She was told: “You can’t. UK switches are wired into the wall and are not removable.” Well, "can’t” isn’t a word in Barbara's vocabulary. And so, a challenge became an opportunity -- and an international business.

In 2004, Barbara invented and introduced the first injection-molded decorative light switch cover to the UK -- which required no rewiring. (One of her very first accounts was manufacturing switch covers for Laura Ashley; matching their gorgeous wallpapers onto switchplates.)

After a few years, wanting to leave no continent undecorated, decorative switch covers were introduced to the Australian and New Zealand marketplace and HomePlates Worldwide, Inc. was “officially” born. Today HomePlates has expanded, and develops, creates, manufactures, and sources a variety of products for businesses and brands across the globe... on purpose.

Some of her clients include: Laura Ashley, British Home Stores, John Lewis Department Store, WIC, Grand Ole Opry, Gifford's Ice Cream, Blake Shelton, Aspace, Netflix, Kroger, BBC America, Live Nation, House of Blues, The Coca Cola Company, The Campbell's Soup Company, and many others.

CUT TO: 2019. Barbara's personal passion for cooking and entertaining led her to create a cookbook to honor her mother, Bernice. She needed to hire food photographers to shoot her recipes and discovered they were dragging around slabs marble and wood that were ridiculously heavy and difficult to store, not to mention they stained like crazy.

And so, she created Best Ever Backdrops, a line of 100% waterproof, lightweight, and stain resistant backdrops for food and product photographers, content creators, bloggers, and stylists because she was tired of watching her photographer friends lift backdrops that could earn them gold medals in weightlifting.  If you need to photograph your products (the ones you will be creating!) shoot them on the best backdrop in the market. Oh... and her book "Eat This, You'll Die!" is in the works. If you want to hear the backstory of how all of this began, watch Barbara tell it here.

As for writing, yes, Barbara still writes for a variety of media: television, stage, and print. You can see The Quarantine Diaries which started as a fundraiser for The Actors Fund to help those in the entertainment community during Covid19. She is proud to say they raised over $100K. Her new play, Trump v God (His Last Case) was recently published. Click here to learn more.