‘Mom-preneurs’: Philly mothers creating businesses, many while on maternity leave

Bo Zhao, 41, of Center City, gave birth to her first daughter, Milu, in June 2018.

During her maternity leave from an e-commerce company, Zhao and about two dozen other moms eager for community started meeting at the Nesting House, a now-shuttered spot in South Philadelphia. The women described the group as “moms lifting up moms, women lifting up women.”

Soon enough, the women started communicating on a WhatsApp chat group that grew to hundreds. Out of the WhatsApp, numerous sub-chats were born, including a “Mom-preneurs” group of women, Zhao included. Members started creating businesses — many of them aimed at helping other mothers — that allowed them to better navigate motherhood and work life.

“We decided we could really support each other,” Zhao said, “not just through the trials and tribulations of being moms, but with inventing and running businesses.”

Zhao, who has an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, experienced what she calls a “light-bulb moment” while on maternity leave and fretting about which crib, stroller, and other baby accoutrements to buy.

“It was frustrating getting baby gear,” she said. “The stuff is expensive, you’re not sure what’s good, and it’s only useful for a couple of months, till your baby outgrows it.”

So she invented Baby Gear Group, a rental library of parenting accessories to help families save money. Zhao said, “I created what I wished had existed for me: a better consumer experience, and a better parenthood journey.”

Other original Mom-preneurs members in the area have launched businesses of their own, either while on maternity leave, or during the early years of their kids’ lives. They see the path as a rewarding alternative to returning to the workaday worlds they inhabited before giving birth.

“To parent the way we want to — by raising strong, smart, kind humans — many of us believed the traditional 9-to-5 jobs we had weren’t going to work for us anymore,” said Stef Arck-Baynes, 49, of Mount Airy. The mother of a 5-year-old daughter, she’s a Mom-preneur who’s in the process of starting a nonprofit communications company called Achieving Good Communications.

“Having a group of like-minded, kick-ass women with similar values cheering me on as they’re succeeding and thriving themselves has been the push I needed to move ahead with my business,” she added.

“I feel grateful for all of that.”

Beth Auguste, 38, of South Philadelphia, is the woman who created Mom-preneurs in May 2018.

A registered dietitian, nutritionist, and women’s fitness trainer, Auguste had been working as a corporate wellness professional and declared at the time that she didn’t want to return to “an inflexible job where I can’t see my [newborn] baby.”

While on maternity leave, she started Be Well with Beth for “overwhelmed parents to help them fit in healthy eating and exercise so that they can feel their best and have lifelong wellness.”

Auguste said fitness is the “fun side of the business, but the meat of what I do is private-practice nutrition counseling.”

She said her real strength, though, is in community building, a trait that may have inspired one of the first Mom-preneurs, Coral Edwards, to move ahead with her own business.

Edwards, 37, who lives in the Graduate Hospital area, was on maternity leave with her now 19-month-old daughter, Olive, when she created Coral Edwards coaching.

She works to help women in transition — whether that’s in becoming mothers, going back to work after maternity leave, or changing careers.

”I was having a terrible time,” Edwards said. “I didn’t know who I was as a parent, and the software company I’d been on maternity leave from didn’t know how to help a brand-new mom transition back to the workplace.

“It was nothing a new mom should have to go through.”

Edwards needed a life coach. Others might, also, she thought, so why not get to it? She quit her job and invented a new pathway.

“I realized that returning to work to make a millionaire boss more millions was not nourishing ‘heart work’ that aligned with my values,” she said. “But empowering moms is. Turns out, coaching moms is what I was put on this Earth to do.”

Another Mom-preneur, Rachel Daulerio, created her business without quitting her job as a first- and second-grade teacher at the Philadelphia School in Fitler Square.

Beehive at Bok, a community play space for children from birth till age 7 in South Philadelphia, is her brainchild, born in 2019 while she was on maternity leave before the pandemic.

Daulerio said the Mom-preneurs still stay in touch for advice and camaraderie.

“I can write an email to Bo [Zhao] at midnight and know she’ll be up,” Daulerio said. “She, like me and the others, all get it: We’re trying to make the city a place we want to stay in long-term as parents.”

Then, she added, “We are building businesses, but we really are community-minded. Everybody is thinking about how to make their neighborhood better.”