Anna Thachuk of “KeepsakeMom”: Why We Need More Women Founders & Here Is What We Are Doing To Make That Happen

We need to make sure that women have access to opportunities in education, training, and professional development that will help give them the skills and confidence to set out on their own.

As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anna Thachuk. KeepsakeMom founder and President Anna Thachuk embrace many roles: medical school graduate, Ukrainian émigré, devoted mother of three — and, most recently, skilled commercial jeweler. It’s this unique combination that makes her such a perfect leader for KeepsakeMom, where she handcrafts gorgeous, sentimental pieces from the individual breast milk of each of her customers. Inspired by her love of jewelry and her own journey as a breastfeeding mother, Anna has developed a beautiful collection of necklaces, bracelets, earrings, rings, and beads that commemorates the irreplaceable bond of breastfeeding.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

Thanks so much for having me. My career definitely didn’t follow a direct path, but perhaps the first seed was planted back in 2004, when I graduated from medical school and emigrated from Ukraine. With my interest in medicine, along with my medical and health sciences background, I became a diagnostic medical sonographer working in ultrasound. My favorite part of the job was looking at the images and sharing in the excitement of the expectant mothers. Seasoned mothers would talk about sibling interactions and breastfeeding challenges, while first-time moms wondered what their new lives would be like. Hearing their stories, I couldn’t wait to have children of my own and experience it all firsthand.

When our first child was born, it was everything I had hoped for. Breastfeeding was bliss, producing an incredible sense of calm, joy, and bonding that I had never experienced before. But then things changed. After two months, my breast milk diminished to nearly nothing overnight, for no reason that the doctors could explain. It was a terrible and scary time because my baby wouldn’t take a bottle. I tried everything, even using a syringe to put milk near my nipple, but my son wanted no part of it. The doctors all told me that he would eat eventually, but that didn’t make me feel any better, and I ended up spoon-feeding him with only marginal results. Luckily, the doctors finally gave me a medicine that increased my milk production, and I was able to nurse my baby once more. But it was this early scare that made me realize how much I wanted to continue breastfeeding.

As for the jewelry side, I was always interested in beads and sparkly things growing up, and I remember spending hours playing with my mother’s costume jewelry. This fascination with all things sparkly never left me, and I went from playing with jewelry as a child to making jewelry for myself to wear as an adult. Working with acrylic resin, precious and semi-precious metals, and stones and crystals, I’ve been handcrafting my own jewelry for over fifteen years, creating unique, personal pieces for myself, my family, and my close friends.

It was seven years ago, when I was breastfeeding our second child, that I was first introduced to breastmilk jewelry. I read about a woman who for ten years had been adding breast milk to acrylic resin in order to create beautiful breastmilk stones. I was fascinated. As a nursing mother, I knew the importance and deep significance of breastfeeding, as well as how challenging it could be. I started trying different things with my own milk — reducing it, using different techniques to neutralize it, and mixing and casting the dried milk with acrylic resin to create breastmilk stones of my own. Through trial and error, I perfected the breastmilk curing process and began crafting individual pieces of breastmilk jewelry by hand. At first, it was just for myself — and then, through word of mouth, I began making pieces privately for friends and acquaintances as well. From there, everything just kept growing, and I realized that this was something that I wanted to turn into a career.

Fast forward to today. I’ve been handcrafting KeepsakeMom breastmilk jewelry commercially now for over three years, and have served hundreds of customers. I’m so thankful for how this process has allowed me to combine my passions of being a breastfeeding mother, a jewelry maker, and a scientist in order to create memories for families worldwide.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Back in the early days, when I was working from home, I would reduce each customer’s breast milk in a double boiler on our kitchen stove in order to turn the milk into a paste. Initially, I was only doing a few orders each day, but even then, the smell of the cooked milk wasn’t exactly pleasant. It wasn’t long before I was working on dozens of orders at a time, taking up all the available space on our cooktop as well as a couple of additional hot plates. I would wait until my husband and children had gone to bed to cook the milk, as the smell coupled with the heat was overbearing and would permeate our entire home. The only saving grace for my family was closing the bedroom door, but if they opened it to use the bathroom or get a drink of water, it was like, “Oh my gosh!” It quickly became obvious that this approach to reducing all that milk wasn’t sustainable, and with the growth of the business, I started panicking about coming up with a better way. Thankfully, I did, and today I no longer use our own home, or intense heat for that matter, to process all the breast milk for our jewelry.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When I first started, even before launching our website, I opened a store on Etsy. It was quick and easy, and in what seemed like no time, my shop was running up loads of sales. I thought, “Wow, I must be really good.” But what I didn’t realize was that I was the only one on Etsy making jewelry from actual breast milk — and not because I was the first seller to offer such a unique and amazing product. It was actually because Etsy prohibits the sale of jewelry made with real breast milk on its platform for insurance reasons. They deem breast milk a bodily fluid like blood, and their policy prohibits the sale of products made with bodily fluids. So Etsy shut my store down, explaining their policies and putting a quick end to my overnight success. We still sell on Etsy today, but only simulations, and we use the store primarily to steer interested customers to our website.

In a way, this experience taught me that it wasn’t so much my story that mattered, but that of my customers. In challenging the mindset of Etsy and other companies, still saddled with so much cultural and ethical baggage, I found myself championing breastfeeding and its fundamental importance more than ever. In the end, it only strengthened my commitment to promoting not just breastfeeding’s nutritional benefits for the baby, but also the significance of the breastfeeding journey for the mother, with all of its determination, hard work, emotional closeness, and one-of-a-kind bonding.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

That would be my husband. Not only has he been supportive of my taking risks right from the beginning, but he also stepped in domestically to free up my time and allow me to really focus on the needs of my business. In addition to all that, he too is a successful entrepreneur, and his insights and contributions to the growth of the business have been invaluable. He’s really made a big difference, and I’m so thankful. But it’s not just him, it’s the entire family. My children are supportive and show interest in what we do, even participating wherever they can. My family is incredibly important to me — it’s part of what sparked all this in the first place — and this importance continues to be reflected in our business. We know that family is the single most significant influence in a child’s life, and we work hard to welcome and include family members — spouses, partners, parents, siblings, and friends — in all our offerings and efforts.

Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I’d love to say that it was one of the classics, or one of the great business books of all time, but it was actually a practical book I found online called 3 Months to №1: The “No-Nonsense” SEO Playbook for Getting Your Website Found on Google. Our business is web-based, and our audience global, so having concrete strategies that we could apply right away was incredibly helpful. The author, Will Coombe, writes in plain English and shares techniques we used then — and continue to use today — in order to compete for the top spot on Google. Reading that book was exactly what I needed at exactly the right time for my business.

Do you have a favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life or your work?

I have so many favorite inspirational quotes, but this one is maybe the most relevant to me and my company:

“If you don’t see a clear path for what you want, sometimes you have to make it yourself.” — Mindy Kaling

Before I started KeepsakeMom, I really enjoyed sonography and working in ultrasound, but I just knew that I needed something more. There was no playbook for my business, or even any guidelines on how I should do it or what products I should sell. With the responsibilities of a home and a young family, along with a career that I was heavily invested in, it took courage and a great deal of faith in myself, as well as support from my family, to embark on this roller coaster of a journey. But I truly did end up forging my own path forward, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to do that.

How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I guess I would say that we’re helping to make the world a better place on an individual level, with every customer we serve. Like any other kind of jewelry, breastmilk jewelry is meant to help the wearer feel beautiful. But its real significance is in its commemoration of the profound bond between mother and child. There’s something about the tangible presence of breastmilk jewelry that can help give women power, comfort, and strength — whether it’s the strength to meet the challenges of motherhood, cope with a dwindling supply like I did, celebrate a precious memory, or even grieve an unthinkable loss. Every wearer has her own special reasons, and I feel privileged to help craft such meaningful keepsakes for fellow mothers everywhere.

Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?

I think one of the biggest things holding women back from founding companies is that maternal instinct to be with and spend quality time with your children. In addition to whatever biological component there may be, there’s also a lot of societal pressure — as well as personal pressure — that’s put on women in general, and mothers in particular. For me, motherhood held me back for years from taking that leap, and it’s still a huge factor in all my business deliberations. Founding and running my own company has brought me an incredible sense of success and fulfillment, but in the end, my children come first, and it’s often really difficult to reconcile that with the needs of my business. I think that’s something a lot of women struggle with. And not every woman has the kind of support that I’ve been fortunate enough to have.

Can you share with our readers what you are doing to help empower women to become founders?

I have a few women friends who have watched me build and grow my business, and who have reached out and shared their business ideas with me. Of course I encourage them to go for it, but I also spend time with them, discussing their ideas, challenging their strategies, and sharing the lessons I’ve learned so far. And from a more nuts-and-bolts perspective, I’ve offered up our e-commerce platform and a skeleton of our website, coupled with a road map for the content they’ll need to develop in order to optimize their sites for search engines, so that they can quickly and efficiently go live with their products. Just having that support makes such a huge difference, because you’re not starting from scratch, and you at least have a set of guidelines for what might or might not work.

This might be intuitive to you but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?

From my own experience founding my company and helping other women do the same, I’ve seen firsthand how empowering it is to have the chance to pursue your passions, not to mention set ambitious goals and be able to achieve them. Women deserve the opportunity to dream big and achieve those kinds of big goals. And when more women become founders, that fuels more — and more diverse — opportunities for other women and for people in general.

Another reason to consider is the flexibility that comes with running your own business. Obviously, founding a company takes an unbelievable amount of time and effort. But it’s time and effort on your own terms. So you’re working probably harder than ever before, but you do have the flexibility to make your own schedule, and to carve out time for your family or other aspects of your life whenever and however works best for you. That’s something that should not be underestimated, especially for women who so often have to balance a million things at once.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Can you please share 5 things that can be done or should be done to help empower more women to become founders? If you can, please share an example or story for each.

As I mentioned earlier, making your own path takes courage, faith in yourself, and support from those around you. And one of the most crucial things we can do to empower women is to give them the resources, the time, and the support they need in order to pursue their dreams. So how do we do that?

Well, first, we need to make sure that women have access to opportunities in education, training, and professional development that will help give them the skills and confidence to set out on their own. We need to offer and promote scholarships, grants, and coaching for women.

We also need to set up mentoring opportunities so that women can receive support, advice, and fellowship from other female founders. I think that for men, a lot these types of mentorship opportunities are kind of built into the system as it is today, and there are plenty of role models for them to emulate or reach out to. So we need to make sure that women have that same kind of support.

Of course, founding a business takes capital, so another way to empower women is to invest in them. Invest in their ideas, and invest in their companies.

We also need to make sure that more women’s voices are being heard when it comes to making decisions, in the business world but also in government and the community as a whole. Once we start listening more carefully to women, we’ll be able to create more opportunities for women to pursue their goals — like founding a company — and they’ll be more empowered to take advantage of those opportunities. Collaboration, cooperation, and inclusion are so important, and I believe that both women and men need to be striving for more inclusive spaces and more collaborative decision-making.

Finally, I think we need to make sure that there are social structures in place to allow women the freedom and flexibility to pursue these kinds of big goals. Too often, there are still different expectations for men and women when it comes to things like family, childcare, and domestic duties. I already touched on how amazingly supportive my husband was during the early days of my own business, which not only allowed me to feel more comfortable taking risks, but also granted me the time and energy needed to get everything up and running. His willingness to step up as a partner in our home and family life was so critical, but not everyone has access to that level of assistance. So I think we need to make that kind of support more available, like by providing affordable childcare.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

That’s a great question, and I think that for me, it goes back to being enthusiastic advocates for breastfeeding mothers and the entire breastfeeding community. While movements around breastfeeding already exist, we strive to contribute momentum, raise awareness, and support those who cannot breastfeed.

Additionally, as I touched on earlier, I’ve encountered commercial obstacles with established companies regarding breast milk. Etsy, eBay, and Amazon, for example, all prohibit the sale of jewelry made with actual breast milk. We also encountered this initially with PayPal and Stripe, which was a huge issue since I was locked out of finding a payment processing platform for the store. On top of that, we ran into international shipping providers that couldn’t reconcile a finished acrylic resin breastmilk stone with their prohibition against dealing with “bodily fluids.” So I hope that our work can help inspire both greater awareness and greater acceptance of all things related to breastfeeding.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

This doesn’t relate directly to my business, but the one person I’d like to meet someday is President Zelensky of Ukraine. As a Ukrainian émigré, my heart truly aches for Ukraine, and President Zelensky embodies the will of Ukrainians to live their lives in a sovereign state and independently shape their own future. He is a true hero, and I am deeply moved by his fierce courage and determination, and the courage of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian heroes fighting and dying on the frontlines — many with no military backgrounds — dentists, millworkers, parents, and other regular civilians. Diverse but united, willing to fight and die for a free Ukraine. Slava Ukraini! Heroyam Slava!

How can our readers further follow your work online?

They can check out our work and follow along with our journey by visiting our KeepsakeMom website. We are continually developing and adding to it, so we would encourage readers to check back regularly in order to keep up with our latest projects.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

Thank you so much for reaching out. It was great to have the opportunity to reflect on such important issues, and to share some of our thoughts and experiences with you and your readers.