The Interview —

Courtney Klein, Founder of Storq

I launched this business in San Francisco after spending nearly a decade in New York. I knew I wanted to go in a different direction with my career and start something new. After a lot of research and hemming and hawing, I saw an opportunity in the maternity space that I felt like I couldn’t pass up, so I jumped in.

We’re always guided by great style and a love for fashion, but at its core, Storq is about designing pieces that solve problems and make life easier. Becoming a parent means everything is about to get more complicated, and having classic, go-to wardrobe essentials makes getting dressed and getting out the door every day that much easier.

Becoming a mother myself definitely helped me feel more confident about the brand we are building. When I put on our clothes for the first time after becoming pregnant, I felt the immediate difference in style, quality, and comfort that we had been working to create.

We always work backwards after identifying a need. From there, the goal is the merge that functionality with something genuinely chic you are excited to use or wear, day in, day out.

The Basics Bundle, hands down. It got me through both of my pregnancies looking and feeling like a human. I got more compliments on my outfits while pregnant than any other time in my life.

This is something we had been planning to do for a while and it coincided with expanding our size range up to 26/3X. There isn’t enough representation in retail as a whole, but it’s particularly bleak in the maternity market. Many brands don’t even use actual pregnant models! Pregnancy makes shopping difficult enough without having to navigate through unrealistic representations of what your body looks like during this time. We wanted to become a place where any woman, at any stage of her pregnancy or postpartum, could arrive at our site and feel like these things were designed for them.

Reading is my way of resetting after a long day.

Not really! It’s a mix of running around for meetings, long facetime calls going over product development and production with my remote team, working on finance and marketing, and traveling.

 Do your research and make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. Then, accept that you can never ​really​ know, and just do it anyway.

We have a few exciting things in the works, particularly in the nursing category. Stay tuned!