Our next girlboss interview features Loren Heller and Hillary Cullum – co-founders of Berkley Clothing.
Meet the gals:
Loren Heller and Hillary Cullum are the co-founders of Berkley Clothing. Loren is mom to a wild four-year-old and an Associate Principal at Daggerwing Group, a change and communications consultancy. Hillary Cullum is mom to a wild shihtzu and is President of HSC Advisors, a retail consultancy focused on driving profitability.
How did you meet each other?
We met while working in Neiman Marcus’ Denver store – where our friendship and love of fashion began. After 15 years of friendship and career evolution, we founded Berkley Clothing together, with the goal of empowering women to feel beautiful and confident throughout their pregnancy and beyond.
What are you tuning into lately?
The entire Bridgerton series and any episode of How I Built This by Guy Raz on NPR.
What career advice do you have for millennial women?
No task is below you. Taking the time to learn all aspects of the job you’re doing will only benefit you in the long run. Many of the skills and behaviors that we have leveraged during Berkley’s development are things we learned in our entry-level jobs at Neiman Marcus.
Who inspires you?
As we built Berkley we were inspired by mothers – specifically, our own moms. The strength, tenacity, commitment, and love they taught us inspired us to create our own company and develop a product to empower other moms-to-be. We are so inspired by our moms that we’ve named our products after them.
If you could have done something differently in your lives, what would that be?
We’re both super type-A perfectionists, and we both agree that we should’ve given ourselves more grace and understanding as we found our paths. It hasn’t been a straight line to get where we are today and in retrospect, each and every step and misstep has contributed positively to who we are as adults and what we each bring to our business.
What are some of your goal(s) for the next few years?
Grow Berkley into a profitable, thriving business. We are a newly launched business and are currently developing our next product. Our goal is to be successful enough to continue our journey and impact the lives of pregnant women.
What advice would you give your younger self?
You are strong enough to get through whatever life throws at you. It might not turn out the way you envision it, but it will change you for the better.
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