My name is Liz Turrigiano and I'm a mother of two and founder of Esembly.
Since becoming a mother I'm on a mission to make reusable diapering accessible,
and manageable for everyone.
I am born and raised in New York.
Eventually I landed
what I thought was my dream job, working in advertising as an art
producer. My husband is a sound designer and it was the first time
that we were both making decent money.
We were like, "Well, we know so many people with kids that just aren't very happy.
Let's just not have kids." And, no joke,
I think it was eight weeks later that I found out I was pregnant with my
daughter. But then she was born and
I was transformed by motherhood.
I knew that I wanted my time away from her to be doing something that
felt really, really purposeful.
I had a lot of hesitations about what motherhood was going to be,
and one of them was, I had a deep fear of losing my focus on sustainability.
I knew that throwing away a day's worth of diapers was probably more trash than
my husband and I created in a week.
By like month seven of my pregnancy, we were already looking into
alternatives
to disposable diapers, but it didn't end there.
I knew that the financial benefits were also really helping our family.
Once you invest in your initial stash of diapers, your only recurring expense
is running your laundry twice a week, and a bag of washing powder every two months.
And disposable diapers are notorious for the messy leaks and blow outs,
so when you use a well-made reusable diaper, it can contain it.
In June of 2009, I was approached by another producer about partnering
with her on this cloth diaper service.
And I was like, "Wow, here's this incredible opportunity to combine, you
know, my passion for sustainability, with my love for my community."
Diaperkind is a sustainable diapering service
for New York city.
So we provide diapers to families, pick them up, drop them off and launder them.
When Zoe was born, I approached my husband and said, "I want to start
this company and leave my job."
This was really tough for us. Living in New York City,
we needed two incomes.
So Mark and I sat down at our kitchen table.
We went down our budget line by line, analyzed every expense
with the goal of figuring out just how little I could afford to make,
and that number would be the salary that I collected from our new company.
My partner, Sarah and I both worked two jobs while Zoe was a baby.
And then she was like eight months old Diaperkind could finally afford to pay me.
We made a lot of compromises, but you know, I think a lot of those skills
for me were I learned when I was younger. Money was tight and I watched
how my parents somewhat magically gave me and my two siblings everything we
needed by budgeting and prioritizing.
And then I took those skills that I learned from my parents and brought
them to being an entrepreneur. We were doing so well, helping
families radically reduce waste.
I mean, we were washing 18 to 20,000 diapers a week, but we were limited by
the geographic boundaries of the service.
And so five years later, we started to think about developing Esembly. I
got pregnant with my son at that point.
The joke in the company is that I had Clyde because we needed a baby tester.
Esembly is a full product line from reusable organic diapers, to skincare,
to storage bags, to laundry products.
At the same time that this was happening, we actually
lost our lease at Diaperkind.
I had to move out of my apartment that we lived in for 12 or 13 years. Honestly,
looking back, I don't really know how
I made it through it.
It's just like, as a parent, you just have no choice.
We moved to Diaperkind to an even better space and Esembly, you
know, got a little delayed, but it launched in late February of 2020.
We're definitely more comfortable now than we were in those early
days, but we're still doing that
shuffle. Things in New York are so prohibitively expensive,
but you know, one of the habits that I still carry through is
I try to save up and buy goods that will save me in the long run.
We saved over $2,000 with Zoe by using Esembly diapers and saved
more than that with Clyde, because we were able to pass
those same diapers down to him.
And when we save on simple things in our day to day, we can sort of roll
that money over to something that feels really important for our family.
Whether you have a lot of money or a little money, like don't hide it
from your kids. Let them in on how you handle the family's finances.
It's been a ride and leaving my stable job and starting the company,
but I hope someday that my kids look back and also remember how exciting it was.
I don't think I've legitimately had a day off in 10 years, but it gave me
more freedom throughout their childhood to be able to be present in a way that
I would not have been able to be had
I kept my job in advertising.
My advice to new parents is really just to stay true to yourself.
You just have to be creative. Pick the things that you love and keep them up
even in parenthood, because the more satisfied you are as a human, the better
your family is going to be overall.