The Birth of OMazing Momma
My college roommate Christy is an interior designer. In 2006, she started her own firm, Christy Foran Design, based out of Chicago. She transforms homes with her exquisite taste and built a business that makes me proud. We had dinner this summer and I asked her about work. She chuckled and said, “I’m barely a designer anymore. I am a business owner.”
This truth landed with me. I started OMazing Birth in 2019 because of my passion for women and childbirth. From the start, I followed a thread of curiosity. Five years later, I am not only a birth doula. I am a childbirth educator, a lactation counselor, postpartum doula, mindfulness coach, yoga teacher and a perinatal mental health counselor.
However, to Christy’s point, I am also a business owner.
A few weeks ago, I rebranded OMazing Birth as OMazing Momma. I first dipped my toe in my new brand last spring when I started posting almost-daily messages on instagram. I called the account OMazing Momma. The name is more encompassing of my target audience.
Last month, I organized a prenatal and postpartum resource fair. Instead of hosting a September speaker for Hive Family Collective, I invited local providers and expecting and new families to our Public Library to meet. I used the opportunity of the resource fair to launch my new brand.
A few weeks before the event, I designed and ordered new business cards and added all of my certifications as well as a URL to a website that didn’t yet exist. So, I had to complete my website prior to the event. Deadlines are effective. As are pending births. The day of the resource fair, I had a doula client who I thought was going to be induced. Not certain when I’d be called in for support, time pressure forced me to move quickly.
I worked for hours and hours on my website, even on the weekend before the fair. The stickiest part was exporting three years of blog posts to another site, then importing them to my new website. The photos did not move with the import, so I had to replace them one by one. I wanted to poke my eye out. It took me over three hours. It was crazy because I migrated my old Square Space site from 7.0 to 7.1. Why so hard??? I gave Square Space my feedback.
The evening before the fair, I typed the the last sentence on to the last page and gave a whoop! It was an early vision but I knew I was nearly done. I couldn’t believe it. After dinner, I invited my husband to come to my studio to take a look at may new website. I was excited as it loaded.
He oohed and ahhhhed. I smiled. He generously helped proofread the copy. I corrected misspellings and spacing errors. I replaced “we” with “I” and semicolons with commas. I deleted confusing text and added missing words. My husband is an attorney and a talented editor. I was grateful until I ran out of energy and hit a wall.
I was tired. I thanked him for his time as we walked downstairs. A minute later, he was grinding coffee for the next morning and said, “One thing. If you could make all of the pages uniform, it would look cleaner.”
I stared at him. My heart raced. I didn’t respond. Stunned. He kept going. “And I don’t think the navigation tabs are clear.”
My head spun and I was mad. Or maybe defensive. Or both! This website was not just some random site on the internet, it was ME. He just called my baby ugly. I retorted, “I think it would have been a lot nicer if you had just told me how awesome it was instead. Do you know how hard I worked on it???” I stomped upstairs. I barely slept that night.
I got up the next morning and went straight to my computer with a vengeance. He was right! The navigation was confusing. I replaced the tabs prenatal/postpartum/offerings to support/connect/educate/yoga. I formatted each page to make them uniform. I deleted and revised. I didn’t stop until it was done.
I was on fire! I finished with twenty minutes to spare before the event and my client wasn’t in labor. I felt great. New website, check, check.
Looking back, my husband was right. His suggestions made my site easier to navigate and more uniform. In the end I appreciated his feedback. But in the moment, it was brutal.
I am proud of my new website. I hope that you find it easy to use and as pretty as I do! Thank you for being on this OMazing journey with me!