Mom’s The Boss

Inside Bay Area:

Elizabeth Falkner was a young married go-getter and had all the attitude that went with it, a career centered around product development for lingerie made all the sense in the world. It was sexy. It was fun. It was a reflection of herself.

Fast forward a few years, though, and Falkner, like a lot of her friends, had moved on to motherhood. A life of lingerie laughably in the past, Falkner had traded teddies for teddy bears, brassieres for blankies and binkies.

Still, Falkner’s go-getting hadn’t gotten up and gone just because of a baby. Fearing a future filled with conversations no more scintillating than the ins and outs of potty-training, Falkner traded in a Mervyns corporate career that no longer suited her lifestyle and staked her claim to a new, more flexible career that had her creating baby and children’s products out of her home.

“When you’re around a baby, it gets into your brain,” says Falkner, 37, who launched Mariposa Baby and developed her first product line a year ago. “But I could never be a 100 percent stay-at-home mom. I would put my eyes out. I was really career-oriented before, and to be honest, I had my first daughter just a little earlier than we’d been planning. I didn’t have a ton of time to think, OK, I’m ending my career. We had a house, I couldn’t afford to not work. So I thought, ‘I have to have something that’s not just mommy and potty-training.’ I mean, my friends and I are women with interesting careers and we’re talking about pull-ups for half an hour.”