A Breastfeeding Platform Built on Community: A Conversation with Swehl’s Co-Founder, Elizabeth Myer

Like many, I was under the false pretense that breastfeeding would be the most natural thing in the world. I was pretty committed to having an unmedicated birth and did all of the things to try and help make that a reality. So naturally, I’d learned about the breast crawl and “golden hour”. Fast forward to delivering in April 2020, during week three of Covid lockdown: my husband wasn’t allowed in postpartum, the nurse rotations were sparse, and my daughter had severe oral restrictions, including a tongue tie, which was discovered in the hospital, along with two cheek buckles—and a lip tie, which we learned about many months after the fact.

My co-founder, Betsy, and I both became first-time moms during the height of the pandemic and we very quickly bonded over our postpartum experiences. For different reasons, we were both shocked that, as two competent women who’d accomplished a fair bit in our lives prior to becoming parents, we found breastfeeding—which is purportedly super natural and intuitive—to be so confusing. More than that, the resources did not feel representative of our identities or our lives. I remember that those first conversations we had over two years ago felt very sticky—like there was just something about this problem we couldn’t get out of our minds. And as we peeled back the layers of the category, we started to get really fired up, because it was truly absurd to us that no one was tackling breastfeeding in a modern way. So we made it our mission to build an all-inclusive platform that combines open education, access to experts, real community, and innovative products all in one place.

This is a tricky one for me to answer directly—and not because there aren’t a host of positive impacts for nursing mothers—but because breastfeeding is a real commitment in time and resources, and systemically, many new parents in this country just aren’t set up with the support that is required to stick with it. Modern messaging really promotes the notion that women should have the freedom to make choices on how they feed their babies, and this narrative is often driven by what’s best for the mental health and wellness of a mother–which are things that we really do support as a business. It’s important to frame up my answer with that context, because the reality of being a parent in the United States is such that we receive a fraction of the support that we actually need. That said, I do think if there was more of a focus on how breastfeeding actually benefits the nursing mother—like contraction of the uterus postpartum, and balancing hormones—seriously, who doesn’t want this? Plus, the fact that women who breastfeed are at a lower risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer—we might be collectively empowered to ask different questions.

I think it’s a real combination, honestly! Breastfeeding is undoubtedly a learned skill, as is evidenced by chatting with any parent of multiple kids, who will gladly share how vastly different their breastfeeding experiences were from one baby to another, and how each called for an entirely unique set of tools. That said, by the time we do become parents, we’ve already established ourselves as thriving people in the world with full identities that we’ve worked hard to cultivate. In building Swehl, we’ve noticed that a common theme in early parenthood is to really doubt ourselves when it comes to things like breastfeeding, if for no other reason than that it really is completely new and the stakes feel very high. But so much of feeding and parenting in general relies on trusting ourselves, our lived experiences, our bodies and our relationships—so there’s definitely a fair amount of intuition sprinkled into the mix too.

Not at all! I think every pregnant person expects that they are going to be tired once the baby is born, but most don’t realize that it’s because they’ll be feeding every two-to-three hours around the clock. We actually designed our Swehl School Pregnancy hub as a way to highlight some of the more realistic elements of the breastfeeding journey without inundating folks with information that’s too tactical in nature to digest without having a baby to practice on.

Here’s an easy one—keep a slideshow of your favorite baby pics on hand to view while pumping. Even the act of looking at your sweet babe helps increase oxytocin, which is responsible for initiating letdown. That cute fact aside, it’s so hard to give universal advice on this topic because I’m hyper aware of the fact that everyone is dealing with very different lifestyles and circumstances. Instead, I love to give working pumping and breastfeeding moms words of encouragement. Women are efficient, resilient and oh-so-badass, and that very specific phase of reentering the workforce as a lactating person is just further proof of that fact.

Yes! Community is an integral part of parenthood and, given that Betsy and I met in a mom group, it’s also quite literally the foundation of Swehl. In early 2021, we started hosting small Zoom circles with new parents—mostly friends of ours, and then eventually, friends of theirs, and so on. We thought that we were brilliantly conducting R&D for our eventual suite of products, but we very quickly realized that the Circles themselves were exactly the type of support that was missing for so many. We’ve since scaled our Swehl Circles to a community of thousands of women, and we’re really fortunate to bring in incredible hosts to lead them. In our continued pursuit to provide access to information and people, we work with leading experts, influencers and celebrities in the space around a single inflection point of the pregnancy or parenthood journey. We also have a form to Request a Swehl Circle in the event that someone in our community needs a specific question answered or simply wants to propose a new programming theme. Swehl Circles are arguably the best part of each week, and we’re constantly blown away by the strength and vulnerability of our community.