Tag: working mom success stories

Mama Maker: Jen, Creating the Confidence to Start

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Jen Moncada wants kids and adults to pursue their interests and express themselves while learning, working and growing as a family.

“It is very important to me that everyone is doing what they should be doing as far as their own personal fulfillment,” she says. “That is something that I’m preoccupied with whether it’s my friends, or my family, or my customer.”

It’s one of the light bulbs that inspired Jen to create Preppy Prodigy as a means to help her son get excited about schoolwork.

“I started making stuff to get him to do his homework,'” she recalls. “Back-to-school shopping for school supplies was my favorite and so to me it was just like a magical moment of ‘Oh my God, this could be everything I love, this could be the work that I’ve been looking for.”

It was around the same time that Jen had been looking to reignite her own fulfilling career while raising her three and five-year-old boys as her husband lived abroad in Europe.

“I wanted to find my life’s work, and the only skill that I had was in the creative arts,” says the art school graduate.

Jen was more excited about school supplies than the typical greeting card foray into the stationary business. Plus, traveling to trade shows in NYC wasn’t in the cards either.

“Once my youngest was three and a half, he started going to preschool, so I had one day a week for like two hours,” she says, echoing what every toddler mom can relate too. “Every year, that he added an extra day of preschool I got to add an extra day of work.”

“It really is little by little, and I hope moms get the message that there are lots of different ways to start,” she says.

“It can be hard to balance the motivation, or the drive to build your business as fast as you can because that’s what the world tells entrepreneurs to do,” says Jen. “I think moms have the greatest amount of potential, especially because a lot of them already have a second income, are educated and already have had careers.”

Family structures are another area where Jen wants everyone to have the opportunity to pursue what’s right for them.

“Every woman I know is doing it differently,” she says. “I wish that what women want in the workplace was more of a universal conversation that we were all having.”

With so much in flux around paid leave and childcare, it’s an ideal time to share the many ways families carve out their support systems and come up with new, creative solutions like taking an entrepreneurial path.

“I think what happened to me is what happens to most of the people in the paper industry that I know that are women,” she says, describing how she drew a monogram for her wedding invitation with watercolors and her dad had it professionally photographed and digitized.

“At the time I was an interior designer and loved my job,” she says. “But I loved doing my invitation and I thought ‘I really want to come back to this,’ and so I knew when we decided to have kids that I was going to stop working and I hoped that I would come back to that.”

Jen wasn’t the first member of her family to join the paper industry. Her dad, uncles and grandfather all worked for a paper company in Ohio going back to the 1950s.

“My uncle was a chemist and he worked for the same paper company doing the chemistry of the paper and my dad’s other brother was their staff photographer,” she says. “My dad was a salesman. I grew up going to the office with him and he’d have all these (now I know) PMS color charts, so I thought they were paint chips and I thought ‘oh, he has the coolest job because he gets to pick out all these colors.'”

“I actually didn’t even realize I was in the same field until years after doing it,” she says.

After selecting envelopes, Jen worked with her dad to figure out where to source paper and she was able to do so from one of two of the biggest American paper suppliers.

“I was lucky that my husband works in IT, because I have a professional printer and most printers cannot take the really thick heavy card stock,” she says.

“I didn’t want to just always be just a hobby business,” says Jen. “I knew that to compete, I had to have the best materials and it was important to me that they were all American made.”

Once Preppy Prodigy was up and running, she shaped her product offering around what her customers were asking for.

“Everyday, I have people coming to me saying ‘hey, I really wish that you had this, is this something that you can make for me?’ and so a lot of my collection started with custom orders that I created for somebody, that I sell now,” she says.

School supplies are just the beginning.

“My dream is that I have a full collection of products,” she says. “An adult, an entrepreneur, a woman, a mom can go on to our website and find products where you feel like ‘hey, I can launch my business, I can get my own business cards, and I can get my own letterhead and stationery and maybe some graphics,” she says.

Jen calls it “the confidence to start” whether that’s as a business or much earlier in childhood.

“I wish that there was a way for five year olds to say, ‘I’m a scientist’ and there’s a line of school supplies that are science related and they can experiment with that.”

“Then a line of products for my teenager,” she says. “He’s excited about going to college, and I’m excited about him going to college and I want to have products that I can give him that keep him motivated.'”

“It’s very important to me that my kids are getting something out of their education that they’re finding themselves that they’re actually learning about the world and that they’re just not memorizing it for a test,” she says.

“I think identity is so important to helping kids and adults,” she says. “You can try on this identity and you can be this person that you want to be. You can reinvent yourself for the season and go back and try again.”

As mothers, we know the art of reinvention all too well and Jen wants to encourage us with “an item that is yours, that is personalized to you, that’s going to somehow motivate you to believe in yourself that you can go to the next step.”

“Business is the most creative field,” she says. “There’s no right or wrong way to do business, there’s no recipe.”

Plus, it’s never too late to figure out what we want to be “when we grow up.”

“My dad never liked his job and I wonder if that’s why I care so much about everybody finding what they should be doing, and so they don’t waste their talent and their time,” Jen says. “It’s hard to fulfill your potential if you’re not even in the right industry to begin with.”

“I just want all of us to be doing what we want to be doing, and should be doing.”

Mama Maker: Cameca, Savoring the Time to Refine Your Craft

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Cameca Bacchus doesn’t shy away from reinvention, having toggled between corporate roles, baking and motherhood. She takes inspiration from women like Sylvia Weinstock who achieved success much later in life.

“I can crunch numbers well, but my passion really is baking,” she says.

“When the subprime crisis happened, I remember walking to my office one day and seeing people leaving with all their stuff at the time, losing their jobs left and right,” she recalls. “I said, ‘it might be a matter of time before I’m one of those people, so maybe I should figure out what I really enjoy instead of what I just do well.’”

One week later, she filled out an application for culinary school, and then nine months later left her corporate finance job, and began classes while working for a catering company. Things changed again when she started her family.

“The thing with working at bakeries, is that you start really early, like, I was working a shift from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. but not being around in the mornings is what’s tricky,” she says. “You also would work on the weekends, so that was another point of losing Saturdays and Sundays–when can we ever have a day when we’re all home together–because you just don’t get to replace that time.”

Now Cameca approaches baking as a part-time passion, one cake at a time. Her goal is to grow Creations by Cameca at a gradual pace as her kids get older and more independent. Meanwhile, she is back in a corporate role and also has time to support causes like Behind the Book as a board member, which is hosting its Book Bash fundraiser on June 19 in Washington Heights to give 3,000 books to young people in the neighborhood.

“The biggest goal I have now is to continue to just refine my craft,” she says. “I have a two year old, and I still want to be able to enjoy that season of her life, so I don’t necessarily want to sacrifice the key parts of the day for baking at this point.”

As any mother who juggles a corporate job and young kids can attest, there isn’t a lot of energy left at the end of the day. That’s precisely when Cameca heads into the kitchen.

“Baking has always been something that I find reduces my stress,” she says. “The key is just that I can take my time and really give it the deliberate, intentional devotion it needs. It’s because I enjoy it, it gives me a sense of calm, so even though I’m doing it at the end of the day, I know I’m the only one in my kitchen and I can take my time.”

Cameca encourages fellow moms to focus on the long game and not put pressure on ourselves to achieve milestones at the pace we were once accustomed to, and to be “okay with things not happening in the exact time frame that you wanted.”

“You can take your time and you can really let yourself grow in stages,” she says. “So that when you do land on the top, you can stay there.”

And for those moments when you’re feeling overwhelmed or questioning yourself and your choices?

“Remember your reason why you’re even pushing for this in the first place,” she says. “Where you might be right in that moment is not where your story’s going to end. That’s just one point where you are and your story is still being written.”

Cameca sees burnout as a sign that it’s time to reevaluate and make changes, pointing to the critical need of a support system when you’re “taking any leap.”

“Who’s going to help catch you?” she says. “You can’t have it all without support. It’s just impossible to do by yourself.”

Cameca seeks support from her husband, her mom and friends when she needs an extra set of hands or hours outside of her late night baking sessions. And her kids will pitch in, especially for a taste test.

“They definitely have an appreciation for it and so I do hope, at some point, they can see that ‘hey, mommy’s a business owner,’ like this is something that people can do,” she says. “You can own a business and run a business, so that’s important for them to know.”

“Someday, I do want to have a bakery where they can run in and be like, ‘mom, let me help you.’ That’s my goal.”

Mama Shaker: Abigail, Accepting the Risks of Change

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While the world was in quarantine, Abigail Nawrocki worked 12-hour shifts with her team to keep online orders humming, moved across the country, and had a baby.

“When everything shut down last year, everybody started ordering more from home and relying on more distribution companies to get them the goods that they wanted,” she says.

“In the beginning it was scary because we were all still going to work and there were so many unknowns with COVID, but I think now everybody’s got really good corporate policies around it, there’s a lot of structure and safety so we’re just enjoying it and riding the wave.”

Abigail’s ability to embrace fear is at the core of how she manages the logistics of growing her family and her team.

“I think that’s just how I’ve always lived my life, and what I role model for my kids as well, so that they have similar tendencies,” she says. “It’s okay to take the risk, and even if you fail it’s not that big of a deal.”

Originally hailing from Chicago, Abigail moved from Indiana to Los Angeles after graduation—and as of last year, now calls Nashville home with her husband and four kids.

“It’s always been a natural state for me, taking risks and really just seeing the return on investment from that,” she says. “My parents have always encouraged me to get out there on my own and make things happen for myself.”

After finding out she was pregnant a few weeks before lockdown, Abigail experienced the contrast of a socially-distanced pregnancy without the common courtesy of someone offering their seat or a helping hand.

“You lose that cultural aspect of being pregnant and having everybody in amazement of you in public so that kind of sucks,” she says, noting there are pros and cons.

“It was just me and my husband and no one else was allowed in the hospital and we got that time together to bond and to bond with the baby,” she says. “But it also was a lot of pressure to leave the hospital right away. Normally with a C-section, I would be in recovery for three or four days. I left in 40 hours after this one.”

Now that Abigail has a “pandemic baby who’s not used to being in group settings” she’s seeing how new situations affect everyone differently.

“There’s been so much change in the last year and that’s really what’s difficult for people,” she says. “It’s not necessarily the isolation or the environment that they’re in, but it’s the change right?”

“Look for your village,” she says. “When you have those people around you supporting you, or even just there to talk and listen, it takes so much of the mental load off and allows you to get back into a good space.”

Abigail enjoys connecting with other moms, whether it’s outdoors at the park or virtually in groups like HeyMama.

“It’s very hard for humans who are habitual creatures to accept change and so having that community and being able to talk to them and go through the change together really helps,” she says.

Mama Shaker: April, Finding Flow on the Other Side of Disruption

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April Beach grew up tumbling around the waves of California and Hawaii long before she established the rhythm of entrepreneurial life as a mom of three boys.

“I learned how to stay calm in really scary situations,” she says, a skill which helped propel the growth of her companies while her kids were still babies.

“Frankly, then it was like survival,” April recalls. “I would literally have 20 minutes to work and then I would have to go breastfeed, and then 15 minutes to work and then break up a fight, or three minutes to work and somebody fell down the stairs.”

Fire drill scenarios are never out of the realm of possibility when managing a house of (now) teenage boys, food allergies, multiple businesses and a podcast.

“I’ve always designed my companies in a way that I could be the mom that I wanted to be,” says April. “I don’t believe anybody makes a better leader than a woman. We have the ability to see things in a different way, with a deeper purpose.”

This means embracing disruption, instead of constantly bracing for “if I was going to be interrupted,” and instead preparing for “when I was going to be interrupted, I knew exactly what I had to come back and do.”

As April’s kids become increasingly independent, she now structures her week to match her energy output.

“Every day is different, but it’s strategically different for a reason,” she says. “My business work, or content creation, or anything I need to do that is original thought or laying out any sort of plans or roadmaps is always Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday–what I call messy day.”

April reserves the end of the week for her clients and what she describes as “brain work,” where she can be “totally 100% focused on building their business, their offers, their marketing, all the things that they need,” followed by a weekend to recuperate.

“I am a big advocate of what I call burning the picket fence—burning what society says is right and wrong, and how we parent, and how we make money, and how we work, or how we don’t work,” she says.

In fact, April welcomed cameras into her home to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how she and her family Burn the Picket Fence. In one episode, the tears that follow a call from her son’s school about food allergy protocol in the middle of the workday hits painfully close to home.

“We are worthy of the walk that we’re supposed to walk, even when we don’t feel like it because we don’t always feel like it,” she says. “We are worthy of that walk that was only designed for us. Nobody else can take that walk but us.”

Burning the picket fence also gives us permission to surrender to what we need instead of sustaining a pace merely because we can.

“I always wanted to do ‘all the things’ and frankly I did a really great job at doing it all, and now I’m realizing that I don’t want that anymore,” she says.

“I believe I’m soul-tied to the ocean and it’s just always been a part of who I am,” she says. “The hardest and the best lessons I’ve ever learned have been taught to me from the ocean. But now getting in that same flow state, I’ve had to learn how to tap into that being in different parts of the country.”

“Right now I need the ocean,” April says, after living in Colorado for 20 years. “I definitely think I’m ready for my beach house. I have to get back to that. It’s like going home.”

Mama Shaker: Gladys, Summoning Our Superpowers

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Gladys Simen is known as the “motivation whisperer” among friends and colleagues–something we could all use right now. She’s recognized her own courage to propel forward through any circumstances, whether that’s starting over in five different countries or navigating the compounding responsibilities of working motherhood.

“I came to a country that was not originally mine with no support system and it stretched me and I didn’t break,” she recalls.

For Gladys, it took a pandemic and racial tension reaching a tipping point to finally recognize her superpowers: being brave and “super acutely aware of things.”

“There’s a lot of things that changed in the world,” she says, reflecting on 2020. “It hit me hard–harder than I thought it would–because I’m parenting Black kids, so I had to start thinking about what am I leaving for them not to have the same struggle.”

“Every parent, no matter what color you are or race or creed or whatever, you want the best for your children,” she says. “I want my kids to look at me and say ‘you contributed to this being a better place.'”

Another superpower Gladys had to get comfortable with is being a role model. She’s quick to point out that it took courage to recognize her influence beyond her own children, and recalls a time when she hesitated to assert herself publicly.

“I discovered that having an edge is not a bad thing,” she says. “I realized that using my voice brings me more support than I thought. People come and say, actually I like the new Gladys better.”

Now, she’s expanding the use of her forces for good to help people define post-pandemic life on their own terms at www.mylifecouch.com.

“I won’t be shocked or surprised if people now realize maybe that life is not about racing to have a title anymore,” she says. “It could be just being present or enjoying what you’re doing. I’m trying to create that platform for other people, because that’s what fuels me.”

Gladys is particularly passionate about the intersection of career and motherhood, having been through her own transformation after her first and second experiences returning to work after having a baby. She encourages new moms to focus on everything gained in the process, especially during a particularly rough day (or year).

“You’re more powerful than you think because you have that tiny human being that you created and you have gone through a crash course of any leadership thing that people can teach you,” she says.

It’s one of the reasons that Gladys gets so frustrated when people in the workplace don’t recognize–over even go so far to discount–the superpowers that only motherhood can teach you.

“Becoming a mom is juggling so many things at once and still showing up,” she points out. “I think boards of directors or companies need more moms because you know how to make things work with very little.”

Gladys wants to flip the script on how we often react when presented with a list of qualifications in a job description or career development plan.

“You should be coming with a badge, ‘I’m a mother. I tick all those boxes.'”

She’s also learned that it takes a lot of courage to say no and stay true to what provides meaning in your current situation.

“Every single day you wake up, there’s an opportunity to do something different, better, greater, bigger,” she says. “There’s no right or wrong answer.”

Gladys gained the 20/20 vision we were all hoping for—and in some cases may need to do a double take to realize is within us.

“I’m having so much fun building amazing human beings and satisfying their curiosity,” she says. “This is the amazing age where they will never be six and three again, where they’re just exploring and seeing the world through their eyes. It’s magnificent. It’s success for me right now.”

Even though Gladys had to adjust to lockdowns and virtual school while juggling her full-time technology role, she loves that her children have so much more access to her.

“They know that I’m their best friend because we can go and jump in a mud puddle because we want to,” she says. “These are the moments that I was not able to give them before.”

“I usually say the superpower’s inside you and you don’t realize it until it is time.”

Mama Shaker: Rhonda, Adjusting Expectations of What’s Enough

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Running a startup and raising twin 5th graders through a season of wildfires, literally and figuratively, requires Rhonda Collins to be more compassionate about what’s possible in a 24-hour period.

“I end up feeling the way I know a lot of working moms feel,” she says. “If I never slept, if I didn’t have a family and didn’t have anything else to do, there would still not be enough time in the day for me to do everything.”

It’s why Rhonda recently began starting her days by asking herself what the single most important thing is for her business and her family, rather than a to-do list.

“Sometimes it’s two things, or maybe it’s three things, but it’s not 137 things anymore,” she says.

“I feel like that’s all I can do,” she says, adding that she ends the day reminding herself she did her best. “These times are just super challenging.”

Rhonda’s instincts to pare things down to the essentials are what led her down an entrepreneurial path after “an incredibly satisfying career that really fed me” as a social change documentary filmmaker.

“I had my twins a little bit later in life, and so I had a long stretch of living fairly minimally,” she says, recalling the visceral reaction she had to the growing pile of brightly colored toys and baby gear that began accumulating in her living room.

“I was faced with having two small children and having to figure out, ‘I gotta sell this stuff, or I’ve got to give it away,'” she says.

Rhonda’s realization other parents shared the same challenge was the impetus to create ToyCycle, specifically as a service that places value on the time spent with our kids instead of sorting through an excess of outgrown toys and baby goods.

“I did not wait this long to have children so that I could then just work my ass off all day long, every day of the week and never see them, never actually have quality time with them,” she says.

Interestingly enough, 2020 dished up an abundance of time that would normally be limited with tweens or teenagers.

“I see them in the morning and then I go up and I check on what’s going on, and they show me an assignment they’re working on,” Rhonda says about their co-located work and school schedules. “Then we eat lunch together and they bring me down a smoothie that they just made.”

“I feel like we are much more bonded and together than we ever have been,” she says.

On Fridays they have movie nights huddled in a chair with popcorn. She also carves out one-on-one time, as challenging as it can be with twins.

“I feel best about myself and about my life when I just step out of my business self and say what I want and need to do,” Rhonda says. “Right now, it’s been time with my kids.”

“I feel connected, like life feels like it’s supposed to feel,” she says. “If I forget that for a few days, I just keep reminding myself of that.”

“Let’s just read together, let’s spend some time together, let’s hang out,” she says about her new definition of accomplishment. “That’s it.”

Mama Maker: Viola, Drawing Us Towards Happiness No Matter What Happens

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Viola Sutanto found joy within the four walls of a hospital room where her 9-year-old daughter awaited a bone marrow transplant for aplastic anemia, ultimately defying the odds of a match with her 3-year-old brother.

“They had told us of course we’ll test your son, but just know that sibling matches are a 25% chance, so don’t hold your breath,” Viola recalls her doctors saying at the time. “So when we heard that he was a perfect match, we couldn’t believe it. It was such a miracle.”

Now Viola wants to pay her gratitude forward by publishing Eat Cake for Breakfast and 99 Other Small Acts of Happiness in partnership with The Collective Book Studio and will give a portion of proceeds back to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. She’s been amazed at the response to her iFundWomen crowdfunding campaign, which has reached all the way to her hometown in Singapore.

“I was really very touched and overwhelmed,” she says. “In the first 24 hours of the campaign, we had raised thousands of dollars. Longtime friends of mine, people in our community and even friends I hadn’t heard from in years—suddenly I’m getting texts and messages from them saying, ‘I cannot believe you went through this’ and ‘here you go, I want 10 copies of your book.’”

Sharing Her Story

“I’ve been pretty isolated for more than a year since Maika was diagnosed, and I’m a very introverted person so I tend to hold it all in,” Viola says. “I realized, gosh, I’ve never even told most of these people what had happened.”

The inspiration for Eat Cake for Breakfast and 99 Other Small Acts of Happiness began when Viola and her daughter came up with sketchbooks as a way to keep themselves occupied during the hospital stay. The “100 days” creative movement had also recently gained popularity.

“So that’s when the drawings started happening,” she said. “We’d pick one thing to draw and it could be just the most mundane thing in the world. I think my first drawing was actually a dinner at the hospital or something silly like that— but over time it just became something fun for us to do.”

Viola started posting the drawings on Instagram and as a former book designer, she naturally began to imagine them taking shape in page form.

“What happened last year made me realize, as a family, how much resilience we have,” she says. “I’m a more optimistic person now than I ever was before, and also very mindful of being grateful for everything that we have.”

Because Maika was immunocompromised following her treatment, Viola’s family entered another year of social distancing and mask-wearing with plenty of practice and perspective.

“I think it really helps to find the silver lining in everything and every day,” she says. “Being able to see that on the upside, while stuck at home I get to spend a lot of time with my kids, which I love. I have the privilege of working from home—some people don’t. There’s just so many things to be grateful for despite everything else that’s happening.”

Viola’s perseverance has helped her carry her sustainable bag and home goods business through the abrupt changes that came earlier this year.

“Our wholesale business plummeted between March and now,” she says. “It’s still very much in recovery mode and that was a real bummer because we had started off the year strong. Every day we’d pick up the phone and get order cancellations and postponements. It was really devastating because most of our accounts are mom and pop stores, or they’re small businesses like mine. We have real relationships with these people and worked with them for years.”

She stays grounded by centering herself with meditation and journaling, before jumping into full days of distance learning and running her now booming e-commerce business. It’s a practice that helped Viola get through her darkest days.

“The only other person who was really in the thick of it with me is my husband and that’s all we talked about,” she says. “Sometimes I just don’t want to talk. I felt like my journal and my meditation practice was my own thing that I could do solo, without having to worry about how everyone else is feeling. And that felt sacred to me.”

No matter what life throws your way, Viola recommends giving yourself a break, taking it one step at a time and focusing on the small things you can start with.

“Try to find the silver lining somewhere,” she says. “There’s going to be light at the end of the tunnel, even if it’s a super long tunnel and these days of not seeing where it’s going to end. But I do believe it will be there.”

“If you just take the time to notice, there’s always something, some small joy to be found.”

Mama Maker: Sarah, Deciding How We Want to Live

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Sarah Kelly’s rebound from a breast cancer diagnosis at 32 weeks pregnant to building a clean beauty brand featured by the likes of Good Morning America, exemplifies what “salty” women are capable of.

“I was up in Maine at my parents’ house and my sisters were there and it was one of those moments that you’ll never forget,” she says about the dreaded phone call that no one ever expects.

Just 72 hours earlier at a routine prenatal checkup, Sarah mentioned the lump she’d recently found to her OB-GYN, at the encouragement of her sister Leah, an oncology nurse who’s now her business partner. That Tuesday appointment led to an ultrasound on Wednesday, followed by a biopsy on Thursday and confirmation on Friday that it was indeed stage 3, triple-negative breast cancer.

“They wanted to start chemo right away, and it was too big for surgical removal,” she says. “The first cancer treatment that you do, you can receive while you’re pregnant. So I started two rounds of chemo and then they induced me at 38 weeks.”

What Sarah calls her “warrior week” started with the birth of her daughter, followed by blood transfusions two days later, and her third round of chemo two days after that.

“It’s just amazing; I always say, your body can handle so much,” she says. “You just have to have the right mindset.”

Sarah also credits the support she had during treatment, especially while she and her husband were between houses and living with her in-laws. She points out that her 14-month-old and newborn were in incredibly capable hands with her mother-in-law, a neonatal nurse.

“Cancer sucked, but it also gave me perspective on how I wanted to live,” she says.

“I think I was checking the boxes—half of them were making me happy and the other half were creating a lot of toxicity,” says Sarah about life back in Boston, which involved battling traffic to and from work, taking time away from her kids.

The idea of starting a business with her sister Leah entered the equation, inspired by the emerging interest in green beauty and a lifelong dream to build her own brand after working in sales and corporate marketing.

“Having lost my hair and everything, putting on a lipstick really empowered me to feel a little bit more feminine throughout my journey,” says Sarah. “That’s the direction we decided to go in and then it just evolved, talking about how we take care of ourselves, eliminating stress in our lives.”

Salty Girl Beauty took a minimalistic approach to cosmetics and body care, made locally in small batches using organic coastal ingredients. The name is a double entendre, honoring the resilience of women.

“What we were going through at that time in our lives, you needed a lot of grit and sass and attitude,” she says. “I think women feel that throughout the day they need to have that armor—whether you’re going through amazing things or a really hard time in your life.”

Sarah noticed that while she was getting a lot of attention during her treatment, finding ways for her husband to feel supported too was critical. So she, Leah and their siblings started Foundation4Love as a non-profit arm of the brand to carve out quality time with caregivers.

“Making sure that we were staying connected was really important to me, and so people would come over and watch the kids while we could go out to dinner,” Sarah says. “So that’s kind of the thing we do with other people going through this. Who’s their number one, is it their family or is it a sister, a husband? We try to do something that allows them to disconnect from their cancer and connect with whatever is love in their life.”

Through the spirit of partnership they’re also funding the cold cap program at New England Cancer Specialists, running workshops with Mount Sinai, and even spun up a new kind of cancer wellness retreat called Warrior Revolution—together with Cynthia Besteman, the cancer survivor behind Violets are Blue Skincare.

“There are so many conferences around the medical side and the treatment side but we really wanted to focus on, ‘yes, you’re going through cancer, but how do you live through that?'” she says about the full-day events which covered a range of wellness, intimacy and mental health topics and ended with a pajama party.

“At the last retreat, we had about six stage IV 30-40 year-old women they didn’t know in our own community,” she says. “And now they’re best friends. Being able to create those connections has been really great.”

While 2020 brought a lot of uncertainty for Sarah, Leah and their team through the spring and summer months, things took a very exciting turn when the opportunity to be featured on Good Morning America popped up.

“Getting that national exposure has been life-saving,” she says. “It’s been literally the biggest whirlwind ever. To see how the four of us, as well our greater community, helped and pitched in so that everything came together for it was just really, really special.”

Coming together, whether it’s as “Salty Girls” or as a family has given Leah the life she reimagined for herself five years ago.

“As much as I probably work too much, it’s on my own terms and I can do it in the living room while my kids are around,” she says. “I’m very present and we’re able to do the things that they want to participate in and spend a lot more time outdoors and all of the things that I think create a happy house.”

While that often means Sarah has a six-, five- and two-and-a-half year old clinging to her while trying to put makeup on, she still believes in the importance of self-care “without it being a big production.”

“Being able to have that message to talk to women about taking care of themselves and not putting themselves last,” is what fuels her.

“Because when you’re healthy, everyone else around you can be healthy,” she says.

Mama Maker: Angela, Creating Our Own Story

Posted in Career, Giving back, It takes a village, Mompreneur, Work from home, working momTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Angela Engel flips right past the “why me?” question that many stumble over when the opportunity to make a difference presents itself. The mother of three is a publishing industry disruptor by day, who mobilized the creation of PPE at the start of the pandemic–while continuing to lead the San Francisco chapter of Hey Mama, support social causes, and navigate distance learning.

Her response when people ask how she raised $30,000 and distributed 10,000 face shields across the country—including Children’s Hospital Minnesota, Alameda Health Consortium and Navajo Nation clinics in Arizona and New Mexico— says everything about her willingness to spring into action.

“When this all hit and I saw my best friend literally in the ER when the Princess Cruise landed and he was working night shifts and lost it when he couldn’t get a face shield, I was like, ‘who else is going to save him?’”

“I think that same spirit is the greatest thing you learn when you’re an entrepreneur,” she says. “That fire, that spirit, that idea…what’s the worst that could happen? Someone says no, right? That’s not a big deal.”

Angela felt a similar call to action when she was “really pregnant” with her third daughter and had grown weary of publishing industry trade shows where she struggled to find a humane place to pump in concrete convention centers.

She dabbled in children’s apparel for a while, which was more kid-friendly and introduced her to the faster pace of retail.

“I would bring the baby with me and put her in the stroller and that was great, but I missed publishing,” she says. “It’s the creative piece.”

While doing business development for an independent publishing house in Petaluma, Angela “noticed the surge of self publishing” that was more akin to the speed of fashion than the traditional publishing industry.

“Why are we letting Amazon and self publishing take that market share?” she realized. “Why not pull together my colleagues from traditional publishing who are fantastic, who are graphic designers, who are typesetters, who are editors and let’s form a collective? We can do this as good as any big house and we can do it fast.”

The Collective Book Studio was born in 2019 around the idea of “partnership publishing” which retains the authors’ creative control and has gained the attention of her industry peers for its disruptive business model.

“We don’t print on demand,” she says. “We really believe the book is an art form.”

One example is how the team packaged up a series of beautifully crafted pages from parenting coach (and Mama Shaker) Sue Groner in Parenting with Sanity & Joy: 101 Simple Strategies in a way that even the most exhausted among us can digest at our own pace.

“What is the message that you want your reader to take away?”

It’s the first question that Angela asks prospective authors (and something that anyone creating content should take the time to answer).

“That will help decide why are you writing this book,” she says.

For Maika handbag designer Viola Sutanto, it’s a reminder that even in our darkest days, happiness is all around us. She’s working with Angela and iFundWomen to fund Eat Cake for Breakfast and 99 Other Small Acts of Happiness—inspired by Viola’s 9-year-old daughter’s hospital stay while she awaited a bone marrow transplant from her 3-year-old brother.

Whether our story involves putting an important message out into the world, or giving back in another way, taking action is the antidote to fear.

“I think the first step is to practice,” Angela says. “Write a sample chapter. Just write, even if it’s not good at all. It could literally be bullet points for all I care. But just get it down on paper.”

Mama Shaker: Louise, Acknowledging What We Want and Daring to Make it Happen

Posted in Career, Family time, Mom guilt, Mompreneur, Return to work, Time management, working mom, Workplace cultureTagged , , , Leave a comment

Louise Heite had a hunch that juggling two kids under three, a job that required round-the-clock conference calls, and a husband who traveled internationally half the month wasn’t sustainable. After moving her family to New York, she began pursuing a new path that led to empowering other women to course-correct their lives too.

“There’s so much energy and so much desire that’s locked up for me to find my own path and make my own dreams come true,” she realized during a new moon meditation.

Louise had recently traded her corporate gig for full-time motherhood, which left her feeling like, “I need something that really feeds my soul.” She knew that she wasn’t alone in trying to find a happy medium as a parent that’s “present while also fulfilling my own dreams.”

“I think what a lot of us mothers these days have to deal with is, first of all, finding a balance between career and also being present with your kids,” she says, so “you don’t reflect back in like 10 or 20 years from now and think ‘they grew up so quickly.’”

Whether it’s rethinking where we live or carving out more flexibility in work hours, Louise believes what’s holding us back is speaking up. She says it can be difficult for women to look inwards, “open that jar and basically then be confident in their own ability to pursue whatever dream that’s in there.”

“Sometimes we get stuck in our own heads,” she says, acknowledging that she often has to coach herself through fear. “It’s a practice what I preach type of approach whenever something negative—or a limiting belief—is coming out.”

In her executive coaching practice, Louise channels her experience leading corporate teams to help women define their own paths to success.

“Ultimately, it’s confidence and self worth, and striking a balance,” she says. “I work with new moms and it’s a little bit of redefining their identity as a mother because often we can no longer commit to the long hours of working that we’ve been doing before kids, yet we feel like we have to do the same amount of hours because otherwise we’re not going to be good enough.”

Focusing on what we need to do our best work–and then asking for it–often leads to a win-win. Parting ways is far from being the only answer to burnout.

“As a woman having worked in corporate environments and then also working for myself, I just don’t believe anymore in the 9-to-5 concept of the world,” she says. “I don’t think this is how we function—that our optimized work is done between the hours of 9:00 and 5:00. So even just flexibility, knowing when you’re most productive and really optimizing those hours is something that I highly recommend.”

Louise points out that “we often live in a space where we think we can do it all, and if we cannot do it all, that we’re a failure,” which was exactly what I experienced as a new mother. Fortunately, it led to connecting with other moms by sharing their stories, realizing there are many different definitions of success, and then making changes so I could strike a better balance.

“It’s about knowing what you really want and thinking about that for a moment,” she says. “There are obviously different paths that we can take after kids and knowing what you want to fulfill—I think it’s a big one.”

While 2020 continues to throw us all for a loop, it’s creating endless opportunities to make peace with change and explore what really matters to our families and ourselves.

“We often go back to the normal or the comfort of what we know because that’s where our worth comes from,” says Louise, cautioning against chasing an old definition of success “only to figure out afterwards that it actually no longer works for us, or that it’s draining us.”

“If you’re not happy somewhere, or not happy with a certain situation, there’s only one person that can change,” she says.

“You can really, truly create what it is that you want to create,” she says. “But you have to dare to make the ask and be open and vulnerable.”

“It can still be a no, but at least you’ve asked.”