Empowering Breastfeeding Moms: A Conversation with The Little Milk Bar Founder, Lindsay White

 

Welcome to Titty Talks!

In this 6-part interview series the founder of Titty City Design, Jessy, connects with real people that are part of #TheBoobment – the social movement we started to break the stigma around BOOBS.

At Titty City Design, we believe that by talking openly and honestly about our experiences with our breasts, we can take back the power from those who over-sexualize our bodies. Instead, we can:

1. Promote body positivity, body acceptance, and self-love.
2. Help educate and share resources on breastfeeding, making postpartum and transitioning into motherhood feel less lonely. 
3. And! Encourage each other to take care of our breast health, because 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime.

Get ready to hear from inspiring organizations, entrepreneurs, and healthcare professionals in our brand-new interview series! Join us as we share empowering stories, and learn from passionate entrepreneurs and experts in the field that are helping to break the stigma around boobs and let's keep the conversation going! 

Meet Lindsay White, the founder of The Little Milk Bar 

Breastfeeding can be a challenging and emotional journey for new moms, and Lindsay White is on a mission to empower and support them.

As the owner and creator of The Little Milk Bar, Lindsay has built a brand that empowers breastfeeding moms to feed their babies whenever and wherever they need to, without shame or judgment. With a focus on community support, The Little Milk Bar is more than just a brand – it’s a community of moms that have your back.

Join Jessy as she Talks Titties with entrepreneur, Lindsay White, to discuss her journey as a breastfeeding mom, the inspiration for The Little Milk Bar, and behind the scenes of her business. Lindsay even shares a secret about an upcoming launch! Get ready to be inspired and empowered by Lindsay's passion and dedication to helping breastfeeding moms thrive!

Listen or read our convo below! Enjoy and let us know what you think in the comments!

Listen to Jessy and Lindsay

Let's Talk Titties!

Jessy: Hi, Lindsay! Thank you so much for taking the time to interview with the “Let's Talk Titties” blog.

Lindsay: Hi.

Jessy: At Titty City Design, we are just so impressed with you, and we're excited to feature you as an entrepreneur and share about your inspiring brand, the Little Milk Bar. 

Lindsay: Yay, I'm excited to be here.

Jessy: Awesome. You have such a wonderful story to tell about how you empower breastfeeding moms, and we just can't wait to share it. So let's dive right in.

Could you share with us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to start the Little Milk Bar?

Lindsay: Sure. So I'm Lindsay, I live in Salt Lake, Utah. I am married with three kids. My husband's from Vegas. I have Allie, who's ten, Coda, who's five. Actually, Allie’s birthday is tomorrow, so she turns eleven. Coda turns six next Friday, and then Frankie will turn two in September, so she's a year and a half.

But it's crazy how I started the business because I never would have thought I would have been in the mom space. Like, when I was younger, I didn't want to get married, and I didn't want kids. And here I am with three kids, and now my whole business is revolved around my children. 

They're the ones that inspired me to start the Little Milk Bar, because when I was breastfeeding Allie, my first daughter, I didn't know much about breastfeeding. I'm the youngest kid, never saw my mom breastfeed. I didn't have friends that had kids that were breastfeeding. And so I was kind of like, new into this world, and I just remember hating every minute of it. I breastfeed her till she was 18 months, and it was so a lot more than I ever imagined. It was hard.

Nobody prepared me, and I was constantly alone. I was always in a bathroom stall, feeding at a restaurant, or in a parked car at a friend's house, or in a private room. And so, I was alone for the first two years of having a baby. So when I got pregnant with Coda, I promised myself that I would have more confidence and I wouldn't hide and feed. And it was insane how big of a difference that changed for me.

It literally changed my entire postpartum experience with him. And I would feed out at the restaurant. We'd be at barbecues with friends. I wouldn't go hide in a room. I'd just sit there and carry on my conversation with my friends and feed him. And it changed everything. 

When I was at a wedding, feeding Coda, my mom came up to me and told me I should go do that in the bathroom. And I just remember thinking, if she had said that to me five years ago with Allie, I would have gotten up in tears, been horrified, and embarrassed, and went and fed in the bathroom because I would think that I need to because someone told me to.

But I had the new confidence with Coda, and so instead I just said, no thanks. I'm comfortable where we're at. And we just kept feeding. And then on my way home, I was like, I want to let every person know that they don't have to go feed in the bathroom or go to their car just because somebody asked them, a stranger, or their mother or their mother-in-law or whoever. And so, 

I wanted to start a brand that is everybody's best friend, to empower them, root them on, and let them know of their rights to breastfeed in public. So that's how it was born.

Jessy: That's amazing. Good for you. That's incredible!

Lindsay: Yeah, it's been a fun journey.

Jessy: And when was that?

Lindsay: We started in April of 2018, so it'll be five years next month.

Jessy: Wow, congrats. That's a pretty big anniversary coming up.

Lindsay: It is. We're doing something special, and exciting. 

Jessy: Oooh! We’ll get to that in a little bit.

When you started The Little Milk Bar, what was your vision for the brand, and how has that evolved over the past five years?

Lindsay: Well, when I first started, I knew from the get-go that I wanted it to be community-based. I wanted to have that support and empowerment for the women first and then sell products second. But, I mean, obviously, you have to survive, so you have to sell products.

So, when I first started, I didn't know what I was doing, basically. I was like, I went to school for business. My minor was in graphic design, and I'm so thankful that I just had to pick a minor one day. And I just was like, oh, graphic design sounds great. So, I picked it. And now I look back, I'm like, thank goodess I chose that because I had the skills and tools that I needed to be able to design things.

So, I designed our Milk Maker T-shirt. And I was like, oh, T-shirts is something I can easily dive into because I can just call up some printers in Utah, see who's able to do a small run for me. I can come up with a design and they can print it on T-shirts for me. And I was like, that's going to be my easiest way and quickest way to help spread the word, too. Like, buying a T-shirt online is super easy, and then word of mouth and people see it and then they ask about it.

So, my first envision was, oh, we're going to have this great merch line and a baby blanket, too, and that's going to help spread the word of our community. But once I started getting a few years in, I started to notice the lack of support in the breastfeeding industry just in general. There are so many breastfeeding brands out there and all of them are selling a product, but none of them are helping these women. None of them are telling them their legal rights. None of them are showing breastfeeding even on their Instagram pages back then, no one was. It was so weird to me. So, I was like, okay, I want to start diving into products that women actually need postpartum and being new breastfeeding moms. And the first product I developed from scratch was our nursing pads.

I worked on those for many months before we released them. So, it changed from ‘just merch’ to creating new products that we know the industry is lacking right now. It's been a big shift. We still love our merch. We will always push our merch. It's a lot of fun. But I love that we've had that little bit of shift of developing our own products.

Jessy: That's amazing. Yeah, those are so cool. I love that you're doing that.

You have so many amazing products. Do you have a favorite?

Lindsay: Well, when I first started, I knew from the get-go that I wanted it to be community-based. I wanted to have that support and empowerment for the women first and then sell products second. But, I mean, obviously, you have to survive, so you have to sell products.

Lindsay: Our Allie bras, I love. And they're named after my firstborn. My kids are spread out, with five years between each kid. So, when I had Frankie (1.5 years old), it's almost like I forgot about the baby stage. When I had her and I was postpartum, I just remember wanting to sleep naked every night. Let's just put it out there. After you give birth, you don't want anybody touching you. You don't want tight constricting clothes. You just feel good naked with your baby lying in bed. And if you're breastfeeding, you're leaking everywhere. So, you can't be naked. You have to wear some sort of support so you can put some nursing pads in there.

And so, I remember thinking, wow, there are so many nursing bras out there. But they're always constricting like they're supposed to be worn out and about. Or if it's a nighttime one, it just looks like something your grandma would wear. And so, when we were working on our Allie Bras, I just fell in love with them so much because I'm like, wow, it's 2023.

How has nobody done something cute like this yet?

That, by far is my baby. And I named it after my first baby. And so, the Allie Bras is my number one, my favorite. My second would have to be our nursing pads. And then, our original Milk Maker Tee. That one's kind of iconic in the breastfeeding world. We love how much conversation it starts between strangers and the relationships, that it's formed from women meeting each other at the park. And that's probably my top three.

Jessy: That's amazing. Those are all so special. I love that they have such special meanings to you and how you make that come through your brand. I think it makes you highly relatable as a person, as an entrepreneur, and as a brand. So well done. Great job!

Could you share a little bit about when you realized that The Little Milk Bar was really taking off? And what was your reaction to that?

Lindsay: I feel like there's, like, a few different moments where I kind of felt like that.

 I think the first moment, by far is when we released the first ‘Milk Maker’ t-shirt. I was starting off, didn't know what I was doing. I had never done t-shirts before. And I ordered the minimum quantity that you could do. And when we released them and they sold out in 24 hours, I was like in tears. It wasn't even a lot. I think we had 36 pieces. It was 36 pieces that had sold out that day. But to me that was like, whoa, it gave me chills. People want this, they need this. I'm not the only mom who's struggling with this.

Next was when we released two sweatshirts. Our ‘Rainbow Milk Maker’ sweatshirt and then our ‘Milk Carton’ sweatshirt, which I love because my niece, who was eleven at the time, designed our milk cartons for us. And we got them screen printed and put them on our sweatshirts. And when we released those, we could not keep them in stock that year. It was just sellout after sellout after sellout, and we'd restock and double the quantities and they just kept selling out.

And we were like, okay, this is a real business! We're going, we're doing this!

And then the Allie bras. When you develop a new product, it's really hard. When you don't have investors, this is all just self-funded. And when you develop and create a product from scratch and you order it from a manufacturer, they have minimum quantities. We're not Walmart. We're not Target. We can't order 100,000 pieces at a time. We can only order maybe 1,000 pieces at a time. And even at that, that takes so much money to do, up front.

I remember talking to my husband and saying,

“Do we do this? Do we jump off the cliff? Do we put all our cash flow into this product and just hope that it sells? Because if it doesn't, it could possibly put us under in the business.”

And we were like, well… Let's just do it. We believe in it so much. 

When we released it, I remember calling my fulfillment center - they do our packing and shipping and we let them know when we're doing a new release. And I told them that we have a new product releasing tomorrow, and we have LOTS of inventory. I told them there would be a big rush of orders, but if we sell out by the end of next month - so like in 60 days - it's a successful launch.

And then, WE SOLD OUT. I think it was in like 2 hours

That one right there too was a big one. Like, wow, okay. People are wanting these products that we're developing for them. I know what you need. Let's create this together. So that was another big moment.

Jessy: Oh, my gosh. That's got to be exhilarating! And scary, all at the same time.

Lindsay: Yes, it is! So scary. Because you're like, okay, let's GO LIVE, and if it doesn't sell, we don't know what's going to happen! But luckily, it did well. 

Jessy: Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. It really sounds like your community has your back.

Lindsay: It goes both ways. I feel like we do so much for our community, and they know we have their back and we know they have ours.

Jessy: Yeah. That's incredible. So much “Congrats” on all the success.

Lindsay: Oh, thank you.

Jessy: So you're a mom of three and running a business is not easy.

Lindsay: No, it’s not.

Jessy: I’m a mom, too. I get it. I was wondering:

What is the most challenging thing for you about being a mom and running a business?

Lindsay: For me, specifically, and because of the business that I run, it is really hard to separate work and family. And it's because my family is so involved in the company. Like, Allie helps me pick colors for the Allie bra, and Frankie is in a lot of our videos for the breastfeeding stuff, and a lot of our photo shoots. 

So it is hard for me. I feel like I'm getting a little bit better at it - separating when it's time to be with family and time to be working. And I think a lot of that struggle was when I was working from home. There was no shut-off. When I'm at home with the kids, the kids don't know (that I’m working).

Now that I have an office outside of the home, I think it's been such a big eye-opener for all of us and how much it was needed. Now when I'm home, I can be home. I'm not working. They see me home physically, and they're like, oh, mom's home. Now we can play. But before that, it was hard to turn off that switch.

It’s still hard, no matter what. It's either the dishes get done or your emails get done and never both, right?

Jessy: Right! Yeah, they take turns.

Wow. That's incredible. Congrats on having an office space. It looks awesome seeing some of the office decor in the background and when you share your office space on Instagram. You’re doing it!

So, what can we expect from The Little Milk Bar in the future? You mentioned a big anniversary coming up, are there any secrets you can share? 

Lindsay: Well, we just released our ‘Retired Milk Maker’ collection, which was a really big deal. Since we’ve started The Little Milk Bar, we've had people say, hey, I'm not a ‘Milk Maker’ anymore, but I want to support the community. 

This has been in the works for five years, designing a collection. I tried designing a few things before that just never worked out. Until now! We were so in love with this collection. Every day we would come into the office, we’d pull the designs up on our computer and were like, wow! This is so good.

We plan to keep the Retired Milk Maker collection around for a while and add more to it. We have a T-shirt and a hoodie, and we plan to add different colors, maybe some other designs.

I don't know if Tati (the Head of Operations) will be mad at me for saying this, we have our anniversary coming up, so we're going to have a fun party here where we can invite some locals to come hang out with us. AND! We are releasing a secret birthday anniversary hoodie. And it's the cutest. I love it. I can't wait to show the world.

It's a lot of fun. Let's just say that we originally designed it to only have it be a limited piece, like a limited edition. And we were only going to have it available for the month of April. But we love it so much that we're like, there's no way that we can turn this off at the end of April. There's no way this is going to work. So we decided to keep it around for the rest of the year.

And other than that, just more products, like, keep your eye out! We eventually want to be where you can come for everything, nursing, breastfeeding… anything you might ever need. We want it to be from The Little Milk Bar because we work hard on the products. We know what we need. We've been through it. We're working moms, and we're there to support the breastfeeding community, not just sell them a product. We intentionally think about every single detail of every single product and how it can better support you.

So just keep an eye out. We do have one or two, depending on the timeline, new products that we have developed coming out this year.

Jessy: That's awesome. Oh, this is so exciting. I hope you're not in trouble for sharing!

Lindsay: I keep looking at Tati, like she's my mom.

Oh, I do have to say, because I've talked about this before… My mom's says that I always tell the story about telling me to go feed in the bathroom. Well, my mom has fully come around now. We've talked about this. She grew up where it was just polite that you get up and you go feed in private. So along this journey, I was scared to tell her that I was opening The Little Milk Bar and to show her our first photo shoot. I was kind of terrified to show her. I love my mom. My mom's an amazing mother, but that is one thing that we didn't see eye to eye on. However, she has come full circle since then. She is my biggest support. She was the star of our last video for our Retired Milk Makers collection, and now she's all on board!

Jessy: That's amazing. Sometimes it's a generational thing, and we are the NEW generation of mothers.

Lindsay: Yeah. Back then, they didn't have the education that we do now. Even when I had Allie in 2012, I don't even feel like there was any education (about breastfeeding). And we still don't have the education we need. But with social media, I feel like the word is spreading more and more. I think the more you're educated on breastfeeding and the benefits and why a mother shouldn't have to go hide and feed, then the more you're on board with that message.

Jessy: Yeah, that's amazing. It sounds like each product comes from an inspiration of something that you needed on your breastfeeding journey and recognizing that other mothers do, too.

Could you share about your process of when you come up with an idea for a product, all the way to launch?

Lindsay: Yeah, I'm trying to think of do you have a specific one you would want to hear about? Do you want to hear about our last launch, our Retired Milk Maker launch? How we came up with that, or like, the Allie bras?

Jessy: What's most exciting to you.

Lindsay: Both? I don't know. We'll talk about the Retired Milk Maker collection because that's the most, like, recent one. 

Jessy: Okay. Love it!

Lindsay: So, I kind of talked a little bit already about how everybody wanted the Retired Milk Makers, so we knew it was on our radar. We usually have something in the back of our minds. We have a list of products that we're releasing this year or things that we want to think about and start working on and release early next year, but we have it on our radar.

We have a list of products that we know we want to release or collections, and then we kind of, like, spread them out in a timeline of where we want to release them. So once that timeline starts is when we need to start working on the development of the product. Then we start searching for colors of t-shirts that we're liking. What's kind of in trend right now?

There's a hard thing for me because I love designing on white t-shirts. I love white t-shirts, but moms don't like white t-shirts because they get so dirty, which I totally get. We think a lot about what is in trend and what colors are people wearing. I like pinks and purples, but not everybody does, so it's hard to find that in between and kind of make everyone happy.

With the Retired Milk Maker collection, we went with neutral, because older women can wear it. My grandma's wearing it, my mom's wearing it, and, Allie is even wearing my sweatshirt to school today.

Neutral was an umbrella almost over every generation, I feel like. So that was very intentional to go with a gray, a black, a tan, that kind of color scheme. For our t-shirts, we decided we wanted to do a fun vintage grayish, black. And then with the hoodies, we wanted to go with the tan. We didn't want it to feel boring, so we wanted to add a pop of color. The funny thing is, we ended up going with orange, and orange is my mom's favorite color. And I'm like, oh, that kind of came full circle. And we haven't really worked with orange a lot in the little milk bar. So we were like, let's do an orange! And it just looked really good with both of them.

I come up with the designs, which really, I just look for inspiration everywhere. If I'm driving down the street and I see something cool that's in graffiti, I'll take a picture on my phone. 

I'll make a collage. I'll make maybe a Pinterest board and then just start designing from there. Once we have the designs, I work with my printer in Arizona – female owned. I love mama owned. And I send her the designs and the t-shirt colors that we've picked and what we're wanting. She prints them, sends them to us, and then we get to do the fun stuff. Then we get to do the photo shoot, and we get to do the video.

And for every big release, we like to do a video. For me, this is so important because there are little details that happen with the collection and the reason why we're doing it. If you just release a t-shirt and put it on the website, people aren't going to understand the story behind it or why it might be so important. And video is just you can do so much with it. It's kind of like mini commercials, I guess, that we do for our collections. 

And this is kind of a funny story. I talked about this in my stories this week. Tati came up with the idea of recreating a scene from the movie Hot Rod. It’s a riot scene. Hot Rod is a funny movie. Like, it's hilarious. There's a riot scene that is supposed to be so funny, but we're watching it and she was like, we should do that, but make it powerful instead of funny. And I was like, I love it, let's do it.

So we got on our phone with our videographer and tell them the concept. We put together a shot list for them. We do a casting call, like a call on our social media. If you're local and you want to come to be a part of our video, come! And then we shoot it how we want it.

And then we have to come up with music, which is so hard. And I'm so lucky that my brother is like a producer, has a studio in his basement, and then my niece is a singer, so she's singing, Lean on me. And they did like a very beautiful emotional version of it.

We put it to the song, we release it out into the world. We always do a teaser. We usually do like an eight-second to 15-second teaser before announcing something's coming and we might show a quick peek of the design. Or we might just show the back of it.

So a little bit of interest is there, but they really are dying to see what it is. And we do that a few days before we release the final video, which is our ‘Drop video,’ which is announcing the collection. We release that and then we usually like to involve our community. Oh, we do press boxes too. This is a very long answer to your question. I'm sorry.

Jessy: You really think of everything when you do launch!

Lindsay: It is one of the biggest parts.

Yes, the launches are important because we want our community to see why we created it. It's important for them to understand the meaning behind it.

And our press boxes are important because we have such a large community that we love. We always pick a few influencers that we've been working with over the years that we just love. And we also pick random followers on Instagram, or someone we shared a photo of breastfeeding their baby and they allowed us to share on our page. We like to surprise our community and involve them in our launch as much as possible.

There’s nothing more exciting than having someone who isn't an influencer and has 100 followers gets surprised because she goes to the mailbox, and she got one of our press boxes! And that is so exciting. Just as exciting to us as it is to her. It's a lot of fun! 

Jessy: That's awesome.

It sounds like there's a lot of effort that goes into your launches, which is incredible. Is that where you spend most of your time or is it on the product itself? What do you think is kind of your balance?

Lindsay: It's both. I feel like my time is split between both. When I decide that we're going to release a product or a collection, I spend so much time on developing it and making sure that it's perfect, and then once it's done, it kind of feels like a relief. Like, okay, we've signed off on the samples. We love this, everything's perfect. But then the second part of the job comes, which is having to plan out the launch of it.

Product development and the launch are probably the two main focuses that I focus on, but I have an amazing team to kind of help fill in all this stuff. In the middle, we have our Titty Squad of three girls that do our customer service. And then I've got Tati, who's our operations manager, who helps with all the things I do, too. I couldn't do this without all of them.

Jessy: Wow. That's incredible. So much congrats! I know we are just getting close to the end of our time here, and I really appreciate you taking this time to talk with me and to share about all the things that the Little Milk Bar is up to and you and your story. It's incredible. It really is. Thank you.

So you’ve got the Retired Milk Maker collection out, and we've got a little surprise coming up soon for the birthday launch….

I kept looking at Tati to see if she is going to get mad at me for sharing a secret thing coming.

Jessy: We love secrets.

Is there anything else you want to promote or share?

Lindsay: If you need breastfeeding support, come follow our page1 We're on Instagram @TheLittleMilkBar_ and then at TikTok, @TheLittleMilkBar. We're a little bit more fun over at TikTok than we are on Instagram, but we have the most amazing, judgment-free community. All our moms are amazing. Everybody there is there to support one another. If you need any support at all, we're a good stop for you.

Jessy: Well, thank you so much. This was so great. And again, thank you so much!

Lindsay: Yeah, thank you for having me!

The Little Milk Bar's Website: https://thelittlemilkbar.com/

Stay tuned for more Titty Talks

Join Jessy for the next Titty Talk in our 6-part interview series where we feature another incredible woman that is a part of "The Boobment," our social movement to break the stigma around BOOBS. 

At Titty City Design, we believe that talking openly and honestly about our experiences with our breasts is key to promoting body positivity, body acceptance, and self-love. That's why we're thrilled to launch our Titty Talks interview series, where we're speaking with inspiring brands, organizations, entrepreneurs, lactation consultants, and healthcare professionals who are passionate about supporting moms and promoting breast health.

By sharing their stories and expertise, we hope to educate and empower new moms, make postpartum and the transition into motherhood feel less lonely, and encourage each other to take care of our breast health. Join us for our next Titty Talk interview, and let's keep the conversation going!

 

At Titty City Design, we believe that every boobie is beautiful, and that should be celebrated. We are a female-owned and operated, small business here to spread self-love and body positivity with our line of boob apparel, boob accessories, and boob-themed decor and products for the home. A portion of our proceeds goes to help support postpartum people and breast cancer patients.

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