or exploring?

Kind of.

It was all quite interconnected.

So I think even back to before we moved to the UAE, I'd always been a bit obsessed with, like, wanting to be able to work from anywhere.

I just wanted to have a way of earning an income that I could do from anywhere, you know, so that I could go somewhere and, like, work and not be affected.

So we're talking, like, 2007, 8 and 9, yeah? It was always just one of my...

Just a filter, like, I was constantly trying to think of things and, you know, I'd, like... not go for certain jobs or think about different businesses like yeah but that that wouldn't work so when we moved over to the UAE the the actual idea was that I like we've kind of just started to set up our property business in the UK so the idea was well why not like I would like step out of corporate totally and I would carry on and like pick up our business because how different could it be growing a property portfolio from the UAE like surely it can't be that different And I made a few mistakes with it and I ended up pausing that for seven years.

How do you manage with the homeschooling?

Julie, can you just tell us your working parent story in brief?

Yeah.

Brief, I had my daughter in July 2021.

I hadn't shared it with anybody previously before joining L- Lansinoh, but she was actually an IVF baby, so a COVID pandemic IVF baby, so I had quite a maternal journey of my own, which is, I think, part of what makes me so empathetic to our consumers, our moms, and just being able to really approach this from a different perspective.

She was born in the summer of 2021 and, you know, becoming her mom just changed the way I saw almost everything, my time, my energy, my priorities, and what support really means.

So she's why this work is so personal to me, and I truly know what those early days can feel like, how beautiful they are, but also how exhausting and uncertain they can be.

I think it made me much more aware that parents don't need everything to be perfect.

I was gonna say, and I love you tee that up, 'cause as you were talking, Julie, about your schedule and all the different people you're interacting with in your travel, your own sleep, your own self-care, where does Julie the parent, the human being show up, and how do you think about yourself in all of this?

Yeah, so

I think...

It had always been a bit of a dream, I suppose.

I remember when the children were really little, so I'm talking about 2015, 2016, and me and my husband kind of said, you know, we could travel whilst the kids are young.

You know, we could do this.

And I think I was like, yeah, we could do it.

And he was a bit more like, no, we couldn't.

So have you had that discussion about what they may or may not want to do in their future?

Mm-hmm

...

it was thrown at us, and I think that's what's unique about all moms' journeys, is everyone's is, is unique.

There's no two that are the same, and...

But I think all of that led me to this place of being able to lead, um, with empathy, and to, you know, acutely understand what our moms are going through, what our families are going through, what our parents are going through in terms of, you know, how challenging this is.

And, you know, everybody says, like, "It takes a village to raise a child," and a lot of us don't have villages, and especially with how we live now, with our dynam- the family dynamics.

And so, you know, I always like to say if Lansinoh can be, like, a little piece of a mom's village along that way, and I think that's, that's how I, that's how I lead.

What does that mean to you personally, and, and what changes when women lead brands that are built for women?