I've been a stay-at-home mom since 2019. My first gremlin (yes, I call my kids gremlins) was about 14 months old, we'd just bought our first house, and I was in full-blown fight-or-flight mode from all of it at once; the life changes, the existing anxiety and depression, and postpartum anxiety and depression stacked right on top. Life was doable. My mental health was not doing great.
I looked for solace in journaling and planners, the way a lot of people do. They were never the aesthetic I actually wanted, and more importantly, they didn't support my mental health or the self-care and rediscovery I badly needed and didn't even know how to ask for. I grew up without a good model for any of that. Self-care wasn't a thing anyone taught me; it was something I had to learn from scratch, later, mostly from my houseplants (that part's not a joke, and it's a big part of why this brand looks the way it does now).
The years it took to get here
I started researching. Then COVID hit in 2020. My second gremlin arrived in 2021; a c-section birth that was traumatizing for both me and my husband; so I took time to heal my body and my family before picking anything back up. But I kept researching in the background. I watched something like 100,000 videos, classes, and creators in this space, learning everything I could. (If you're wondering whether I'm a recovering perfectionist and chronic procrastinator: yes. Extremely.)
In 2023, I finally got the guts to start building; but the creations never made it past my own screen and my husband's eyes. At the end of that year, I got up the nerve to show some of them to my local moms group and ask if they had what it took to be a real business. The excitement from that group was real, and it took flight.
I pushed forward anyway, determined to finally feel like I was contributing something sustainable to my family and being the kind of example for my kids that I wish I'd had. Being a stay-at-home mom isn't a defining characteristic. It's not all you are or all you have to be.
The first launch (and the one sale)
On August 2, 2024, I launched the business; but under a different name, as a sassy, salty, blurred-rainbow digital planner and sticker shop. It had heart, thought, and a decent number of products. What it didn't have was me. It lacked the brand, the personality, and the vision it actually needed.
I put it out into the world anyway. I got one sale. No real plan, no consistency, no mailing list. I kept going like that for a while, figuring this was just what it looked like to build a business alone as a stay-at-home mom with anxiety, depression, and a serious introvert streak; isolated, without realizing how isolated, because I'd been raised to think that level of isolation was just normal. Around the same time, I was pregnant with gremlin #3; by far the hardest pregnancy on my body, my mental health, and my sense of self.
The summit that changed everything
In February 2025, I attended the Females on Fire Virtual Summit, and it was genuinely life-changing. I found a community of women; business owners, moms, people who got it; for the first time. Through that, I finally figured out what I actually wanted this business to look like, to achieve, and what I wanted my life to be.
Shortly after, I closed the door on that first version of the shop. It had been too cookie-cutter, trying to appeal to every style of digital planner and sticker collector out there instead of being honest about what it actually was. That closing was the start of the road to Leaf & Latch; the brand made by me, for people like me, without trying to fit into anyone else's mold.
Where that leaves us now
I'm Amber, and Leaf & Latch is what happened when I finally stopped trying to make my healing look like everyone else's. I create every product from scratch; no cookie-cutter templates, nothing bought and relabeled as my own. These journals may not be perfect, and they're not going to be for everyone, but they're 100% Leaf & Latch: self-care, rediscovery, awareness, humor, plant puns, and a healthy amount of chaos, all held with equal importance.
If you want to see where that original need for a place to put my thoughts down eventually landed, you'll find it in journals like Foliage Dump and Gratitude Grove today. Different name, same reason it exists.
