Marie BOYER-AUBERT
Be careful, her big smile might pierce your headphones and go straight to your heart. As for the clothes she designs, if you try them on one day, you'll never take them off again. With a big, round belly, or not. And I speak from experience, since I've become addicted to them myself. I'm of course talking about Marie Boyer-Aubert, the founder of JoliBump, a sustainable women's fashion brand that offers clothes to wear before, during, and even after pregnancy.
At ENVOL, we love women on the move, and I think I came to the right place by writing to Marie. After attending business school, then Sciences Po, a stint in consulting, juggling an IPO and fundraising, and after three years in the family business, Marie finally decided to create her own brand. Coming from a family of seasoned entrepreneurs and then pregnant with her first child, she couldn't find clothes in which she felt comfortable. Based on her own needs, strengthened by a childhood marked by a father who pushed her in life by making it normal to believe that girls can do as much as boys, and listening only to her intuition and courage, Marie launched herself into a sector that was completely new to her by creating JoliBump, with the mission of filling the immense void she perceived there. Clearly displaying her feminist ambitions for her brand, Marie is part of a global approach by supporting women in their motherhood adventure and helping to free up speech on fundamental subjects, notably through Nouveau Chapitre, the JoliBump podcast.
The one we've nicknamed "the feminist" since her adolescence and who has made women the heart and power of her brand. The one who chose to thwart the pitfalls of the glass ceiling as soon as she guessed its contours and who reinvented herself to "have it all," as they say. The one who knew how to change her outlook between her two pregnancies, and to whom, in the end, motherhood gave wings. Marie, the authentic, the entrepreneur in search of meaning and freedom, the most smiling of model sizes, agreed to speak to my microphone; and so much the better, because I had a thousand questions to ask her.
Together, we talked about the perception we have of clothing today in our society and what it says about us, our relationship with our bodies and the injunctions that weigh on women's bodies, whether they are pregnant or not. We also talked about the liberation of speech around the subject of motherhood, mental load, fairness, Colette and Simone de Beauvoir. And since I went to see Marie with the prototypes of the future ENVOL bags, you'll even have some clues about this at the end of our conversation. But I won't tell you any more...
Let's go! With Marie today, we're blowing your wings.
So listen carefully. Deploy them. And fly!