When Mary Altieri was 5 years old, she sold a man a broken vacuum cleaner for $20.

The man only wanted the vacuum for parts, so it didn’t matter that it was broken. But Mary learned something important: She was good at selling things.

“It takes a salesperson to sell stuff,” she said, twisting back and forth and making the reindeer antlers on her headband bob at the Astoria Winter Market Sunday. “I am a salesperson!”

She’s also one busy 10-year-old, constantly on the go.

Even when she’s right where she’s supposed to be, she can’t stop moving. She dances in place.

Sunday morning she was up early to milk her goats. She barely had time to take a shower before she had to rush off to the Astoria Winter Market and set up her wares: make-it-yourself goat cheese kits, soap kits and bubble gum kits, products she’s developed and marketed as a part of the Young Entrepreneurs Club.

The club is a partnership between Clatsop County 4H and the Astoria Sunday Market. Club members develop, market and sell a product, the goal being to help kids learn real-life skills.

Mary decided to sell cheese kits. She’s allergic to cow milk, so she learned to work with goat milk instead.

She works nonstop in a cycle that begins and ends with the goats. The family sells goat milk “off the doorstep” and it was this milk that first gave Mary the idea for the cheese-making kits.

Federal regulations do not allow the sale of goat milk at places like the Sunday Market, but, Mary reasoned, “We could make a product that would need goat milk” and maybe lead people back to her doorstep.

It took her a while to perfect the cheese recipes and she can’t even remember how many failed batches it took to get it right.

Goats begin the process; they also end it. Almost all of the money Mary makes through market sales goes back to pay for their feed.

The family owns five goats and Mary, who has been grilled by at least one goat expert recently, knows everything there is to know about them. Mary also knows about people, or, at least, she’s learning.

“Some people like this, some people like that … people like different things,” she said. And, she’s discovered, what people like often depends on where she’s selling.

At the Astoria Sunday Market during the summer and at this year’s first Winter Market, Mary’s kits sold just fine. But when she went to the Holiday Gift Fair in Seaside, she realized people were looking for pre-made gifts.

Well, she had an answer to that too: her own handmade soap, packaged and ready to sell.

Her mom, Cynthia Altieri, has helped here and there – she tied all of the bows on the different colored kit boxes, for instance (“All I knew how to make was the shoelace style,” Mary explained) – but mostly it’s Mary.

To learn more about Mary’s work, visit her blog, www.marysmilkmonsters.com, where she posts recipes, experiments and stories.

– Katie Wilson