Jill Koziol was already a successful entrepreneur before she cofounded the motherhood lifestyle brand Motherly.
She had invented, patented, and brought to market a baby goods product called SwingEase that converted regular playground swings into a baby-friendly version. She had just gotten her product into Babies “R” Us and licensed it to an outdoor adventure company.
Oh, and she had two toddlers at home.
So Koziol decided it was time for her to take a much-needed break. But two weeks later, an acquaintance and newspaper editor named Liz Tenety came to her with an idea for a brand geared toward a new generation of mothers.
Rather than taking a break, Koziol cofounded an even bigger, more ambitious parenting business. Here, she explains how it all began.
What was your “aha moment” for founding Motherly?
Liz and I had our first conversation in April 2015, and we say it was like falling in love—we left the conversation breathless. We were building off each other’s ideas and realizing that there was this white space that existed for modern mothers.
I was looking at the drivers of change that could allow a business to have generational longevity. The “aha moment” was right then, because I realized there were three drivers of change.
The first was that millennials would be the first generation that would be digitally native when they became parents, so that shifts their expectations around what they wanted to find online.
The second is that millennials would be the first generation in which women are more educated than men. That’s huge, because it means women would be having children later in life, and the family dynamics become very different. It also changed their expectations around the quality and caliber of content they wanted.
The third was that we knew millennials were going to be the most diverse generation. Today, the majority of births in the U.S. are among minorities. So we knew that this generation was going to be raising a very diverse generation. That led us to very quickly realize that we needed to be woman-centered and not baby-centered, evidence-based and not user-generated, and empowering and nonjudgmental.
What is your biggest challenge?
There are two big challenges we’re facing right now.
The main one is figuring out how to get our existing audience that comes to Motherly for information and inspiration to also come to us to transact and shop for products. All of our readers are inherently shoppers—mothers make 85% of the purchasing decisions in the household—but they are not yet seeing Motherly as the place to make those purchases. So turning that corner and converting our readers into shoppers is the main challenge.
The second is the evolution of where and how the modern mom gets her content. Information is changing very, very rapidly among social media, A.I., and search changes. We have to make sure that we really have a multiplatform approach with Motherly.
What is one fun fact about you that people may not know?
My entire family moved to Park City, Utah, during the pandemic without ever having been there.
The Fortune Founders Forum is a community of entrepreneurs chosen by Fortune’s editorial team to participate at the annual Brainstorm Tech conference, which took place in Deer Valley, Utah, in July. Our inaugural cohort was selected based on a variety of factors, including the potential impact of their companies, and reflected a diversity of geographies, sectors, and demographics.
