top of page
Search

Alexandra Swayne | From Layoff to Launch: How One Mom Built Three Businesses While Raising Two Kids Under Three


Alexandra Swayne, mom entrepreneur and founder of Binky Bands and Sunkiss Media, featured on the Mama Making Podcast


The Leap You're Afraid to Take


She got laid off while pregnant.


Her daughter was one. She had just bought a house. She was expecting her second. And the company she had given years to let her go without warning — despite great reviews, despite a recent raise, despite doing everything right.


Most people would call that rock bottom. Alexandra Swayne called it an opening.

Within a year, she had launched a full-service marketing business, invented and brought to market a baby product that went viral on launch day, and built a women's networking community with over 600 members and 75 people at the first in-person event.


She did most of it between nap times.


The Layoff That Cracked Everything Open

Alex had always dreamed of working for herself. She had the skills — over 12 years of marketing experience — and the independent streak that comes from backpacking 43 countries in her twenties. But the path of least resistance kept her in corporate roles, comfortable enough to stay, not uncomfortable enough to leave.


And then the decision was made for her.


She describes the mindset that followed with a clarity that's hard to argue with: I was already at my bottom. What did I have to lose?


From that place, Sunkiss Media was born. A full-service marketing firm specializing in web design, SEO, social media, paid ads, email marketing, and print collateral. She had the expertise. She had the experience. She had two kids under three and a husband who woke up at five in the morning. And she had, finally, nothing left to protect.


The 2 a.m. Idea

Here's how Binky Bands started: her son wouldn't sleep without nursing because the pacifier kept falling out of the crib. Alex was exhausted, running on fumes, somewhere in that half-asleep half-awake state that new moms know intimately. And in the middle of that fog, an idea surfaced.

What if the pacifier didn't drop? What if it stayed with the baby — on their wrist, always accessible?


She made a bracelet. It looks like an Apple watch. It comes in five colors. It has a pacifier and teether connected to it so babies always have it within reach. And it turns out — she discovered this after the fact — it also helps babies gradually wean off their pacifiers because the scarcity mindset disappears. When you always have it, you stop needing it so urgently.

She took the idea to people close to her. Some were supportive. One person told her she wouldn't be able to sell a single one.


She launched anyway.


What Trusting Yourself Actually Looks Like

Alex is the first to say she's not someone who makes decisions in a vacuum. She asks for opinions. She considers other perspectives. She knows she has blind spots.


But she also knows the difference between input that sharpens your thinking and voices that are projecting their own fear onto your idea. And when it came to Binky Bands, she did the work to know the difference.


She spent nights after her kids and husband went to sleep researching manufacturers, getting quotes, consulting with patent attorneys, checking safety requirements. She ordered 200 units to start — only what she was comfortable investing — and launched on LinkedIn with her story: laid off while pregnant, invented a baby product, here it is.


She sold over 100 units the first day. Went back to her manufacturer the same afternoon and ordered 2,000.


The person who said she wouldn't sell one? She didn't let that voice be the loudest in the room. And that, she says, is the whole thing.


Marketing Something You Actually Believe In

One of the most honest moments in this conversation is when Alex talks about the difference between marketing someone else's product and marketing your own.


She can market anything if she understands the value it brings. That's the job. But there's a different energy when you built the thing, when you needed the thing, when you invested your own money and your own nights and your own risk into the thing. You don't have to manufacture belief. It's already there.


She also knew — intuitively and practically — that she understood her customer. She wasn't guessing at what moms needed. She was one. She had lived the exact problem she was solving. And that knowing gave her the confidence to move forward even in territory she had never navigated before.


She had no experience in the baby product industry. No experience in manufacturing. She figured it out anyway — because she knew that marketing was where she was strong, and she could hire or learn everything else.


She Means Business

The third business was born from the same place as the other two: Alex looked around, noticed something was missing, and built it herself.


She wanted a women's networking group on Long Island that didn't feel like awkward small talk and lead swapping. She wanted something rooted in actual relationships — the kind that come from women who genuinely understand what each other's days look like.


She started a Facebook group called She Means Business Long Island. Two months in: over 600 members. First in-person event: 75 women showed up.


She admits she felt like a total jackass starting it — what if no one came? what if no one cared? — which is the part of this story that makes it so relatable. The fear was real. She did it anyway. And the response told her everything she needed to know about how much this was needed.


On Making It All Work

Here's what Alex's actual week looks like: two days of daycare — no guilt, full stop — where she does the bulk of her focused work. Three days at home with her kids, working in the margins, stepping away from her laptop in the afternoons to go to the park or the library. Staying up late when she has to. Giving herself grace when the day goes sideways.


She's not doing it perfectly. She says so herself. But she's doing it with intention — protecting her time with her kids while building something she believes in, one nap time at a time.


And she has learned, the way most entrepreneurs eventually do, that not every day looks the same. Some days you're firing on all cylinders. Some days one of your kids has a meltdown at breakfast and nothing goes as planned. The grace to hold both of those days without spiraling is its own kind of skill — one that motherhood, she says, has taught her more than anything else.


The Advice She'd Give

For the moms on the edge of making a leap, Alex's advice is direct: the reason most people don't take risks isn't because they don't believe in themselves. It's because they're worried about what other people will think.


And her response to that is simple: if the only thing stopping you is what someone else might think — do it anyway.


Do your research. Get your budget in order. Make a plan. But don't let the fear of someone else's opinion be the reason you never find out what you're capable of.

Because if you don't try, you'll probably regret it more.


How to Connect with Alexandra Swayne







Comments

bottom of page