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Gabrielle Guthrie is the founder of Moxxly, a company that is redesigning the breast pumping experience for the modern mama. In this episode, Gabrielle shares her personal and professional journey into becoming a designer founder who has thrown her life’s mission into building a product that re-humanizes the experience of breastfeeding for women. Gabrielle and her two female co-founders use the best of product design, business, and engineering to give mothers their dignity back.

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Highlighted Excerpt:

Majo: Is there anything you would like to share with the listeners who might be thinking about being a founder? Women who feel passionate about something, who want to throw themselves into a problem space... maybe a problem space that supports other women.

Gabrielle: I think your community is hugely important. So, we could not have done this without a lot of advice, a lot of coffees, a lot of feedback from a lot of other people. Especially being the only designer on my team, and constantly reaching out to other designers and other founders for coffee and feedback.

So definitely build up your network as soon as you can. And then also know your strengths, know your weaknesses, and know what you want to work on and what you don’t want to work on so you can find people to work with who can play to your strengths and fill in the gaps around your weaknesses.

Majo: Coming back to this theme for you around belonging, do you feel like you got to a place where you belong?

Gabrielle: I do. I didn’t think it’d be in San Francisco, but I do. I think there’s a flow, like a pace to every place and every community and I feel like I’m in sync now with the world around me. I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

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Show Notes:

Gabrielle shares her life as a creative little girl who loves to make things, growing up with two older brothers and her father who raised them. [2:50]
The challenges she faced in high school, her rebelliousness, and her relationship with her father. [6:28]
On her experience of freedom in college but how she hadn’t been thinking about the next step. [10:36]
While working on a thesis, she and her project partner talked about starting a company that will help change the lives of women and the challenges women faced throughout their lifetime. [14:47]
On her journey into failure, eventually selling the company and what she learned from the experience. [25:50]
Her travel to China after the acquisition of her company and her rise again after realizing the root cause of the product’s failure, leading to a comeback and a better product. [31:50]
Some tips for those who feel passionate about something or are planning on becoming founders. [40:37]

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References:

Learn more about Gabrielle & Moxxly

Music:

by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs

A big thank you & shout out:

to two of our badass patrons:

Bianca Wendt, an award-winning art director and graphic designer based in San Francisco and London. Learn more about Bianca and her work here.
Jennie Lambert, UX Designer and Marketing Consultant at Weblamb LLC, a company she founded at Stanford University that builds incredible & effective web solutions.