Ashley Merrill on the Misconceptions About Being a Working Parent

Ashley Merrill, founder and chairwoman of the restwear brand Lunya, started the company when she was pregnant. And as she built her brand, she was also growing her family, and her big career moments and her big parenting moments always seemed to align. On this episode, we spoke with Ashley about the misconceptions that being a parent is just a part time job, why we need to speak up about childcare support, and how she’s shifted her career as her children have gotten older. 

In this episode, Ashley shares: 

• Why we need to adjust our expectations about being a working parent

• How she made the decision to hire a CEO for Lunya 

• What it was like to run two businesses during COVID

• Why the flexibility of entrepreneurship isn’t always a good thing 

On Misconceptions About Being a Working Parent

Ashley: I think we have some misconception that having a baby is not a full-time job. And I just want to be super clear: that is absolutely a full-time job. So if you're not gonna do that job, which is fine, you just need to know that someone else is gonna have to do that job. I think we set ourselves up for failure because for some reason we've come to look at parenting or primary caregiving as sort of a thing you can do on the side and that's just not what I found to be true at all.

On Running Outdoor Voices and Lunya during COVID

Ashley: I think the other part of me was wanting to validate that I was a capable CEO in my own right. It's one thing to run your own business, that is something you dreamed up and it's sort of in your image, whether you like it or not, that's what's happening. But another to be like, “Can I come in as just a CEO? Can I come in and be effective?” And so I think I felt a little bit like I wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of that. And OV at the time was a little bigger than Lunya. I also felt like maybe it'll teach me things that will be useful for me just within my own role to grow and bring that back into the business I'm running. So all of those things were true, but I'll tell you, it nearly killed me. It was crazy. It was 16 hour days, every day, which, if you do the math, where do your kids and sleep fit in? Not easily is the answer to that.

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