In the spring of 2014, Elle Rowley was driving back from the Los Angeles airport when her phone lit up with a flurry of notifications.
She had just dropped off a college friend, a photographer who had flown in from New York to take photos of the new spring collection for Solly Baby, the baby carrier company Rowley had started three years earlier. Right before that drive to the airport, Rowley — then nine months pregnant with her third child – had launched a new Solly Baby collection on her website. In the space of a few hours, sales were exploding.
Up until then, it was unclear whether the company would be anything more than a side hustle. Sales had been inconsistent, making it difficult for Rowley to hire staff and plan for the future. But as she drove that morning with the windows down, her belly brushing against the steering wheel, Rowley felt the company was turning a corner.
“I just knew it would never be the same after that,” Rowley told me, speaking on Zoom from her barn in Bonsall, California, about an hour outside of San Diego, where she lives a country-like life with cats, chickens and a garden. “I thought, I think we can do this, this is a real thing.” She cried with joy the rest of the way home.
Rowley, who is 39 and has four children ranging in age from 8 to 16, went on to build a multimillion-dollar company around a product that she believed could make the daily demands of motherhood not only easier, but more beautiful. Her carrier, which allows mothers to “wear” their babies, quickly became a must-have for countless parents. “This Solly Baby wrap has saved my life,” said one mother in a TikTok video in which she instructs her followers on how to maneuver a stretchy wrap around her body and then tuck a newborn into it. Another influencer says she owns four Solly Baby wraps in different colors.
Now, after selling the majority shares of her company and stepping back from the day-to-day of operations, Rowley has a new venture — helping women reframe the narrative around motherhood from “survivable” to “transformative,” as she explains on her new podcast titled “Down the Well.”
“I fear we‘ve unintentionally demoted the status of mother in our cultural hierarchy,” Rowley, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said in the show‘s introduction. “I believe that motherhood is one of the greatest calls to adventure — a hero’s journey unlike any other, with opportunities to grow and to know oneself better than almost any other.”
At its core, the show is a philosophical and anthropological exploration of how cultural narratives gradually stripped motherhood of its relevance and power, reducing it to a diminished and even victim-like social status. Rowley also touches on more practical topics, too, like homeschooling, the true meaning of “self-care” and how her family managed to go sugar-free for an entire year.
By weaving themes of identity, myth and the often unspoken shadows of motherhood, Rowley is determined to reclaim the mother archetype as a creative, life-giving force and an invitation for growth and purpose. “That is the mother archetype –it‘s giving life to things, it‘s potential for creation, whether it‘s having a baby, or giving life to your projects, other people and relationships,” she says.
The hero’s journey for mothers
Growing up in Texas as the youngest of seven children, Rowley watched her mother “come into her own” when she started working at an adoption agency around the time Rowley was five years old. Rowley moved to Utah when her parents divorced when she was 12, and she saw her mother go through another transformation, finding her footing at the same time that Rowley was beginning to discover her independence.
When she was younger, Rowley, who studied English literature and communications at Southern Utah University, never had any entrepreneurial ambitions. What she did have, though, she later learned, was undiagnosed ADHD, which, she now says, explained why traditional jobs felt confining and claustrophobic. “I just have to do it my own way,” she told me.
Rowley met her husband, Jared, in 2006 in Provo, Utah; they got to know each other on a humanitarian trip to Mexico, camping on the beach and working together on painting an orphanage. “We fell fast and hard,” Rowley recalled. They were married within six months.
After the birth of her first child, Rowley found herself descending into a kind of darkness. Alone with a colicky newborn who cried for hours while her husband was away, she began to doubt her caretaking capacity. “It challenged everything I thought about myself,” she told me. The idyllic vision of motherhood that revolved around “baking pies together” looked more like constant fatigue, grocery store tantrums and a deep sense of isolation.
Rowley thinks of those bleak moments as her descent “down the well,” a path downward that eventually leads into self-exploration and rebirth, and is part of the mother’s “hero’s journey” — a feminine take on the template popularized by American writer Joseph Campbell.
Rowley came across the idea in a book by Lisa Marchiano, a psychotherapist who specializes in methods and theories developed by Carl Jung. (Marchiano was one of the first guests on her podcast.) While for a man, the hero’s journey may look like slaying a dragon or exerting dominion over any kind of obstacle, the feminine journey is downward, as Rowley explains it.
“You get sent down the well over and over, and then it‘s dark and you‘re in an unknown land and you have to find your way, and it‘s all about the approach, using humility and open-heartedness and kindness and curiosity,” she said. Rowley became obsessed with the idea, which inspired the name of her podcast.
The start of Solly Baby
Back in 2010, before “mommy bloggers” evolved into influencers, Rowley was looking for a side gig to supplement her family’s income; her husband was still in college and planning to go on to graduate school, and their student debt was mounting. She dabbled in a range of hustles: medical transcription services, selling used CDs on eBay, and filling out surveys for money. Rowley also started a blog called “Elle Keeps Moving,” where she started reviewing baby gear.
Wrangling a toddler, while caring for a newborn boy named Solomon, or “Solly”, she realized how much of a difference the right baby carrier could make. She had used one with her first baby, but the way it dug into her back gave her migraines. She decided she could make something better.
During a visit to her in-laws in Los Angeles, she picked up fabric from the fabric district and, at home, sewed her first wraps – one for her son and one for a friend‘s baby. The result was a carrier that was softer, lighter and more comfortable than others on the market — something her sister-in-law immediately noticed.
At the time, most baby products were designed with the baby in mind, not the mother. Companies like Petunia Pickle Bottom had begun to change that, turning a practical item like a diaper bag into a fashion accessory. Rowley took a similar approach with her carriers — they could serve mothers by both being functional and beautiful. “It just really inspired the idea of designing for the mom – helping her feel not just empowered but also beautiful,” she said. So she bought a used serger she found on Craigslist, opened an Etsy shop and began sending the wrap to bloggers for review.
As a CEO in her twenties, she had no playbook for leading a company. As she went into business meetings full of men, she wrestled with what kind of leadership style she should adopt.
“I thought – am I going to come at this like a girl boss? That‘s what the empowered modern woman does — you take life by the horns,” she told me. But these templates, largely borrowed from and embodied by men, didn’t resonate with Rowley. “I just didn’t want to be that person,” she said.
One time, while preparing for a meeting in Los Angeles with her suppliers, she wondered if she should bring the baby with her. “I was thinking … this is going to be distracting, it‘s going to be all men in this room, is this weird?” she told me.
Over years of bringing her babies to meetings, however, she began to realize that what she thought was a weakness was, in fact, her superpower. “It is completely disarming to everyone in the room when you walk in with an adorable baby.”
Often, the inspiration for her business emerged from the thick of caring for kids. After a particularly challenging day, she recalled Mother Teresa‘s words: “Do small things with great love.” At the next team meeting, Rowley shared the phrase, declaring it the guiding ethos for her company.
Nicole Horlacher, an entrepreneur and life coach in St. George, Utah, has followed the growth of Solly Baby for years. In Rowley, she saw a mentor she could relate to — one who prioritized motherhood yet pursued a mission beyond the home. “She‘s never embraced this ‘boss-babe’ culture of entrepreneurship, but she‘s still been very successful,” Horlacher, a mother of five, told me.
In the chase to have it all, “millennial women are exhausted,” Horlacher said. “We feel like our worth depends on being successful in and outside of the home, but we don’t have anybody to tell us what that looks like except for men.” Rowley has emerged as a voice for redefining success on women’s own terms, pushing back against the pressure to fit within traditional molds of leadership.
Rowley often says that developing her product and learning to market it felt a lot like throwing spaghetti noodles at the wall. There were plenty of missteps along the way: costly events that drew sparse crowds, unpopular colors and other frustrations that pulled Rowley in a million directions.
Three years into the business, Rowley’s husband joined the company, helping it gain momentum. By 2021, the couple sold a majority share, though Rowley remains on the board and even stepped in as interim CEO at one point.
From maiden to matriarch
Since stepping down, Rowley has entered a period of reinvention – and made another descent into the well. Spending more time at home has forced her to confront parts of her identity once tied to the dopamine rush of customer praise and the validation of professional colleagues. “Kids are really great, but they’re not going to validate all of my choices,” said Rowley, who homeschools her two youngest kids in a school room adjacent to the barn.
Still, Rowley didn’t exactly slow down.
She and her husband have invested in other companies, and she wrote two children’s books inspired by their small menagerie – including a beloved Great Dane who passed away last year, along with their sheep and chickens. After a quieter, offline phase, she felt the pull to step back into the public arena through her podcast, speaking out about the possibilities of motherhood.
In one episode of “Down the Well“ Rowley explores the female journey through the archetypes of maiden, mother and matriarch. The modern youth-obsessed culture, Rowley said, has lost its connection to the full spectrum of womanhood, fixating instead on the maiden’s energy of potential and freedom while neglecting the deeper phases of growth and transformation that follow.
“There‘s a blatant resistance in our culture to growing older, as well as the lack of reverence for older populations and a lack of vision for the second halves of our lives,” she says in one of the episodes. That is a long time, she notes, that our culture has essentially written off.
She told me she‘s observed a kind of “thirst” among women for a vision for their motherhood and matriarch phases. Horlacher said that hearing about different stages of womanhood on Rowley’s podcast felt like “air.”
Rowley describes the maiden as celebrated and idealized in our culture, symbolizing beauty, adventure and self-discovery. But without the transformative phase into motherhood, she said, many women remain trapped in a state of arrested development, disconnected from their deeper creative power.
She points to the widespread social pressure for women to remain career-focused — “motherhood is the accessory to their boss-babe persona,” she says on the podcast — and how uncomfortable the culture is with embracing full-fledged motherhood.
The response to Ballerina Farm is an example, she said on the podcast. “We‘ve never seen this more clearly than with the backlash to Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm last year,” Rowley said. “How dare she make motherhood so beautiful and effortless?”
Rowley knows the Neelemans, she noted on air, and has spent time with the family: “Guess what? They are what they say they are,” she told her listeners. With more mother archetypes in the public view, she said, the culture can begin to “rebuild the mother.”
Valuing the matriarch again
If the mother has been devalued, the matriarch is nearly forgotten, Rowley says in an episode dedicated to the story of Anna Mary Robertson Moses, better known as Grandma Moses.
Moses was the beloved American folk artist who started a painting career in her late 70s and went on to produce more than 1,600 works before her death at 101. In the backdrop of Rowley’s Zoom frame is a painting by Moses’s son, Forest Moses, which was a Christmas gift from Rowley’s husband.
“Matriarchs have played important roles in society cross-culturally throughout history – so why is it that we just completely disregard them now?“ Rowley told me. ”And how not exciting is that for women looking forward to the next half of their lives?”
For Rowley, America‘s cultural fear of aging is intertwined with a broader spiritual shift. “I don’t think you can disentangle it from a decline in spirituality and a loss of belief over the last few decades,” she said.
Without that framework, the fear of death has become more palpable, Rowley reflected, and she believes it‘s partly what‘s driving this fixation on youth, too. “I know many amazing, wisdom-filled older people, but culturally, we don’t really lean on them for their wisdom and their guidance so because of that, we think ‘what do they have to offer?’”
After selling her company, Rowley says she feels she has entered an “impact” phase of her life with stewardship and responsibility that sometimes feel heavy, but “in a good way, like when ‘much is given, much is required,’” she said.
“Life can’t just be about ease and self-indulgence, whether you have money or not,” Rowley said. “It has to be about doing meaningful things, giving back in some way, while still keeping family at the center. It‘s the constant yin and yang balance we‘re all trying to find.”