The Founders Series Featuring Whitney Rowell, Founder of Miracle Milkookies

Welcome to the Founders Series where we chat with a few of our favorite mama entrepreneurs who have created amazing brands that we find truly inspiring. In this series, you will get the inside scoop on how these women started their companies, manage work life balance, stay creative and so much more. We hope you follow along and come to love these mamas and brands as much as we do. 
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The first mama we are introducing you in this series is Whitney William Rowell, Founder of Miracle Milkookies. Miracle Milkookies are delicious cookies that helps boost your supply of breast milk.

 

1. What inspired you to create your brand/business?

I would say that I’ve always been very entrepreneurial. I started my first business when I was eight years old selling stationary door to door in my neighborhood. Since then, I’ve had a variety of different businesses. I was actually in marketing consulting in June of 2015 when I had my first baby. A friend dropped off a plate of fresh baked lactation cookies and I honestly had no idea what that was and I had to Google it. I discovered that all natural ingredients: Brewers yeast, oats and flax help milk supply. I always loved baking cookies and made them for friends and family my whole life. So I took those natural lactation ingredients and added them to my go-to chocolate chip oatmeal cookie recipe and started baking them for myself. Even my husband would eat them and I wish it helped him lactate but it didn’t 😂 I ended up deciding to post that recipe to a blog I had called, "Lifestyle Hunting" and the post was called "The Miracle Cookie." Turns out a year and a half later, I was in the back-end, of the blog, and I realized that that blog had gone viral. I really couldn’t find anywhere else delivering fresh-baked lactation cookies to mamas' doorsteps offering that sort of experience I had when my friend delivered them to me. So I thought, "why not turn this into a business?" and the rest is history!


2. What motivates you to keep going and stay creative?

Through the course of my various businesses, I've found myself to get really bored when I make the business about myself. That is when I feel like I’m lacking creativity and motivation to move forward. I’ve learned over the years that the only way to keep going and create something new and different is by thinking “what’s in it for them? What’s in it for someone else involved?” And when I think in that context, I feel so much more inspired to stay motivated, to get creative, to come up with new ideas and always keep pushing myself to move forward to learn and grow and come up with new ideas because it’s not about me, it’s about them.


3. In your opinion, what defines success?

I believe that success is taking your dreams and ideas and turning them into reality, but that comes from embracing failure and learning from it. To being OK with change. To surround yourself with people who are smarter, who are further along, who have a lot more experience than you, and people who just feel like they want to give you advice. I just think you really have to just trust your gut and go with what you know is right because there are also people out there who are going to tell you a lot of ideas and give you their input and you have to be okay with sometimes going your own way and treading your own path and it’s scary. If you can do it, and you can trust your gut to live a life with no regrets, to me that’s the most success you can have.


4. What is the one piece of advice you would give to a new entrepreneur?

You have to want something so much the money does not matter but you need to surround yourself with people smart enough to help you reach your bottom line.

 

5. How do you balance work life and being a mom?

I don’t really think there’s ever been such a thing as a work-life balance as a stay at home mom and a full-time working mom. It's really hard to achieve that and if you have a formula, I'd love to hear it. But, I will say that there is a harmony to working from home and being a stay at home mom and that comes from being okay with unpredictability; having the opportunity to say no more than yes a lot of the time and also just setting goals for yourself. I know for me, I set goals every single morning. I sit down by myself, if I can, and I write a list of all the things I have to get done that day. And they are things I know I can achieve. They might not happen right then, but they are going to get done before I go to bed. To me that’s success, and also making sure my girls have a happy and healthy home life...doing both of those things together. However that looks for us, and how it looks for you, it’s going be different for everyone, but that’s just my work life balance.

 

6. What Anook pieces are you wearing?

Whitney is wearing the Devyn Muscle Tee, Birdie Skort and Nila Bra

 

Thanks for chatting with us Whitney! Follow along with her brand @miraclemilkookies. Use our code 'Anook25' for 25% off their kookies.

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