I was 19 and in my second year of university when I opened my first business. It was a learning center and one-stop shop for academic prep. Students had 1-3 one-on-one private lessons and classes in time management, learning strategies, career advice, and test anxiety management. By the time I was 23 (and pregnant with my daughter), I had 15 employees and 90 students.
I was so proud of what I had built— and still am—but I also knew I wanted to have a family. I took the lessons I had learned about teaching others and work ethic and worked twice as hard to make having a family and running a business possible.
The decision to start a family was pivotal for my husband and me. Eager to be well-prepared, I immersed myself in the literature about pregnancy and childbirth.
When my daughter Anya was born, it brought immense joy and introduced me to motherhood’s challenges. No amount of preparation could have prepared me for the daunting balancing act of being a new mother and businesswoman.
Of course, as many mothers know, these responsibilities were made much more difficult by breast pumping.
Using a breast pump for the first time was a shock. I read extensively about breastfeeding and lactation, and I thought I understood what I was doing. I was stunned to realize that there was no connection between everything I had learned about breastfeeding and the breast pump I had bought.
My first reaction was self-blame—and I got mad at myself, thinking I had chosen the wrong breast pump despite all of my careful research. It took weeks to realize what I was looking for did not exist. By then, finding a good pump became such an obsession that I couldn’t let it go. We live in an era where consumer products make life easier—and I assumed a breast pump was intended to do just that. More importantly, I assumed it was supposed to help me feed my daughter and keep her healthy—and I absolutely hated it. That feeling went against every fiber of my being. I had just come out of a pregnancy where I had many health complications and was on bed rest for a long time. While being a new mother came naturally to me, breast pumping didn’t and it was arguably the single hardest thing about my journey in the early days.
The most frustrating part was the inefficiency. I would pump for 40 minutes, doing everything by the book and I was still getting less milk than I did when I hand expressed. The other thing was the sharp contrast between the feeling of breastfeeding and pumping. Lactation consultants told me to look for the setting that felt the most like breastfeeding, but I never found it. Breastfeeding was pleasant, but pumping felt horrible — for me and for everyone around me.
As I quickly found out, traditional breast pumps are based on outdated technology, often derived from devices initially designed for milking cows. Many mothers, including myself, experience significant discomfort due to improper breast shield sizes and high vacuum levels. Lengthy and inefficient pumping sessions add unnecessary stress to the already demanding life of a new mother. This challenging experience underscored the need for a more effective and comfortable breast-pumping solution, especially for mothers juggling multiple responsibilities.
So, I made a decision: To address the issues I was facing, I needed to invent a new breast pump.
I wanted to find an engineer to build a breast pump that worked like a baby. When I told my husband and explained there was no such thing, his reaction was, “Do you realize what you just said?” At the time, I thought we could use a 3D printer, so my husband just looked at me in confusion and told me to go down the street and buy one.
As it turns out, trying to replicate nature is a very humbling experience—and couldn’t be done with a 3D printer. Developing a medical device requires a ton of testing and regulation, which is bad in the best circumstances, let alone during a global pandemic, multiple global crises, caring for a newborn, and running my own business.
For perspective, remember that today’s breast pumps use the same working principle as those from 150 years ago. Yep, you read that correctly: a century and a half ago.
This made it hard to find research about regular breast pumps, let alone breast pumps with unique features—like those that imitate a baby’s tongue. As a result, we were not only doing everything from scratch and had to do all the testing ourselves and we had a very small amount of data that we could use.
This required nearly endless testing from local mothers and me. Early on, we published a 17 second video, and a lot of moms actually came to us to try the product. We also worked with the Asaf Shamir Medical Center to recruit mothers for a clinical trial. It was a long process and I spent a lot of sleepless nights worrying, because I knew many of the moms from early on would never get to pump with an Annabella. But everyone was really supportive and incredibly patient. Honestly, I didn’t expect the overwhelming support I got from everyone around me. I didn’t expect the willingness of people to take a chance on a 23-year-old college dropout with no medical or engineering background and with a newborn attached to me 24/7.
But this support demanded changes from me, too.
For the first two years of Anya’s life, I tried to be everything for everyone. I wanted to be 100% present in being a mom, a wife, a teacher, a business owner, a friend, a daughter, and a granddaughter. Most of all I wanted to be 1,000% focused on the startup. I wanted to do everything and I wasn’t willing to give up one thing to do the other. That wasn’t sustainable. By the end of the two years, I found I had lost my passion for teaching and the learning center. I spent a year going back and forth, but I finally decided to sell and close the learning center and focus all my energy on both of my Annabellas—my daughter and the breast pump startup.
It was a very scary and dark time for me because I wasn’t willing to give up. At first, selling the center felt like I was giving up on part of my life, but I am better and happier for it. One of my talented employees is now a learning center owner and is using some of my methods, so I like to think the learning center still lives on.
Eventually, I realized I had to do better at juggling work and family. Fortunately, I was able to find an open-space office called “Mommywork” that was a half-office, half-daycare center. It allowed me to take breaks during the day and spend time with my daughter. It was also a great way to meet similar-minded parents, including parents who taught me how to better manage my time.
Throughout all of this, my focus remained on creating the best possible breast pump I could.
To be perfectly honest, by the time Anya was two, I was done breastfeeding and tried stopping. But I found that when I wasn’t testing out our prototypes myself, my conclusions were off, the development process was slower and I always felt I was missing key information. As we developed the pump, I ended up breastfeeding for more than three years. Anya still wanted to nurse from time to time—she is a very clever toddler who would mirror all my parenting methods back to me—and I ended up breastfeeding her way past her third birthday.
It has been four years since I last breastfed Anya, but I have continued to pump every so often to test updates to our pump. To my amazement, I can still pump a teaspoon of milk on a good day because the pump stimulates my brain to produce milk. While I don’t know of other moms who have tried pumping with Annabella years after stopping breastfeeding, I genuinely believe the fact that it is the only pump I can still get milk with after all this time is proof that a tongue mechanism is what was missing all this time.
Finally—by the time Anya was six—the breastpump I created was available for purchase.
It is amazing to think back to the day I demanded a breast pump with a tongue and see where we are now. Whenever someone says, “I wish this pump was around when I was breastfeeding,” I always reply, “Yeah, me too!”
It took five years for Annabella to take off: five years of hard work, meeting with mechanical engineers, starting the company, iterating the development, and getting the thing sold to consumers. Of course, every moment has been worth it.
And of course, there were endless challenges. The biggest one was that I couldn’t take Anya with me everywhere I wanted. But, in a way, this made me better. When I first started the business, I built my life and work environment so that I could never really be very far away from Anya. However, when my company started taking off, I was forced to spend more time away from my daughter. While I knew how important it was for her to experience the world apart from me from time to time, I never dreamed it would be as emotionally challenging for me as it was.
While it remains a challenge, I know the work I am doing with my business makes me an even better mother and as a startup founder who creates products for moms and parents, being a parent is a huge benefit. I am able to really understand my customers because I am one of them.
Challenges and triumphs marked my journey from a new mother to an inventor and entrepreneur. In that regard, my entrepreneurial journey was no different from anyone else’s. What made it so special was how deeply personal this experience was. Every year, millions of mothers are befuddled by breast pumps that fail to meet their needs. I never imagined myself in this role, but I was driven by a desire to solve a significant problem for mothers everywhere.
I remain committed to ongoing innovation and supporting breastfeeding mothers, continually striving to make their lives easier and more comfortable. Seeing and hearing moms describe their experiences using Annabella makes the hard work worth it.
Read more essays on The Mother Chapter.
