On Starting a Company Before You're Ready, Having Kids After You Think You Are, and Learning to Let Go

Courtney Klein and Grace Kapin—co-founders of Storq, longtime friends, and mothers—sat down together for a conversation about building a company and starting their families along the way, from Storq’s early days to joining the Kindred Bravely family 11 years in.

Courtney: I've been thinking about how to start this, and I keep coming back to the same thing: we had absolutely no idea what we were doing. In the best possible way.

Grace: In the best possible way. We were just two people who looked at a market and thought, this is wrong. We can do this better.

C: And we had never made a garment in our lives.

G: I had never seen a tech pack.

C: I didn't know what a tech pack was.

G: We figured it out.

C: We figured it out! That's the thing. We went into a maternity showroom early on, and the woman there told us, very seriously, that if we didn't do dolman sleeves and prints, we would never make a name for ourselves. We left and made black leggings.

G: And everyone thought we were crazy. Which I think is a sign you’re on the right track, actually.

C: What's funny is that neither of us had had kids yet. We were building a brand for an experience we hadn't had. And I think people were confused by that. Like, how do you know what these women need?

G: I was showing up at strangers' houses to do fittings. And pregnant women will tell you everything. They are not shy. My ankles are exploding. My back. My pelvis. I was absorbing all of this information from people I'd just met. And what struck me wasn't that I related to it—I didn't, really. It was more that I could see, very clearly, that the market wasn't meeting these women where they were. Everything assumed a certain version of this experience. Soft, warm, a little frilly. And I kept thinking: there's a whole segment of people this isn't speaking to at all. That's an opportunity.

C: We were looking at it like a market problem. Who's not being served? Where's the white space? We weren't building for ourselves; we were building for a customer we could see clearly even though we hadn't been her yet.

G: The fittings were basically ethnographic research. Very intimate ethnographic research.

C: Unpaid ethnographic research.

C: By the time we actually launched, I was six months pregnant with Nell.

G: The timing.

C: The timing! We were still doing fulfillment out of our little office in San Francisco, and I finally said, okay, we need to switch to a 3PL [third-party logistics] before this baby comes. Reasonable. We scheduled the inventory pickup for two weeks before my due date. Because first babies are always late. Everyone knows that.

G: Famous last words.

C: I'm packing up the office, and my hands start itching like crazy. I think I touched something. I go to my OB the next day, and she says, “I’m confident you have cholestasis. We need to have this baby today.” And I said, “I can't have this baby until the UPS person comes at 5 pm.”

G: You sent me a photo of all the boxes.

C: I called Zach and said, “Two things. One, we're having this baby today. Two, can you come help me with these boxes?” I left the inventory in the courtyard outside the office and just hoped for the best.

G: This is the most you thing you have ever done.

C: It all worked out. The baby was fine. The inventory was fine.

G: My path into motherhood was a little slower. I kept waiting until I felt ready, which I think was partly because of the job. When you're sitting with pregnant women all day, hearing very frank accounts of what's happening to their bodies, you're not exactly rushing toward it.

C: You were getting a lot of information you did not ask for.

G: So much information. And then when we did try, it took a while. We did IVF. It worked. But it meant the whole thing was more deliberate, more compressed. You figure out pretty quickly that if you want more than one kid, you have to actually have a plan.

C: When we finally did have our own kids, so much of what we'd built just clicked. We'd had this theory that the most important thing you could offer someone in this season of life was continuity of self. That becoming a parent doesn't erase who you were before. Your taste, your interests, your sense of style, those don't disappear. Your life is changing enormously around you, but you are still you. And when I was actually in it with Nell, I was like, yes. This is exactly right. 

G: It validated almost all of it. And it made us better at the work, I think. More patient with the customer. Someone on our team used to remind us: this is a really big deal for her. She's never done this before. Even when we'd spent years thinking about how to pack a hospital bag, for her, it's the most important thing in the world. You hold both of those truths at once.

G: Adding a parenting line felt inevitable. You're already with us through pregnancy and nursing; the next step was the things you need once the baby actually arrives.

C: And it opened up this whole new creative opportunity. The whole market decided at some point that neutral was safe, and now everything looks the same.

G: So much beige.

C: And the other thing is, who is this stuff actually for? The baby doesn't care. The baby has no opinions about the print on the diaper bag. But the parent is going to be carrying that bag every single day. It's going to be in their home. It's going to be in every photo. Design for them.

G: Yes! So much of what existed was designed for the baby and handed to the parent to carry around. We wanted to flip that. These are your things. They should feel like yours. And they should actually work, like, really solve the problem. The changing pad folds a certain way for a reason. Style and function aren't mutually exclusive.

C: And then we sold the company.

G: Which was not the plan, and then it was.

C: Kindred Bravely had been in our orbit for a while. And when we started talking to Carrie Welch [CEO of Kindred Bravely], it was just... immediate. She got what we'd built. She understood why it mattered. And the vision for what it could become felt like a natural extension of everything we'd already been doing, not a departure from it.

G: The brands complemented each other in a real way. Not just on paper. The customer, the values, the approach to product. It felt like the pieces fit.

C: And the team. That matters more than people think. You're handing something over that you've spent years building. You want to know it's going somewhere good, with people who care about it the way you do. And it is.

G: We built something that outlasted us being in charge of it. That's not nothing.

C: All four of our kids know we built something together. They're proud of it, I think.

G: Mine definitely are. Well, the older one had an anxiety attack. But he comes around.

C: They always come around.

Courtney and Grace co-founded Storq in 2014. In 2025, Storq was acquired by Kindred Bravely, where they both now work.