“What do you think about taking all of that money that we saved for the down payment on a house and going all-in on leaky boobs,” Founder Leigh Coggiola-Belza asked her husband a few months ago. After some conversation, the answer was, “let’s do it.”
Mid-pandemic, Coggiola-Belza quit her long-time job in marketing to solve a problem she had dealt with a few years back, after the birth of her children: leaking breast milk while nursing. Earlier this year, she launched her Plano-based company Leaxy to “support the leaky ladies of the world.”
“You can nurse, and you can pump in the tank top, but the focus is really to make sure we’re keeping you comfortable and dry,” Coggiola-Belza said.
The company’s concept is simple, but Coggiola-Belza said she has already had several people tell her they wish it would have existed while they were nursing. Leaxy is an athletic leisurewear brand with a patent-pending nursing tank top and a line of attachable pads to stop breastmilk from leaking through.
While still in its infancy, Coggiola-Belza said Leaxy has already shipped orders to different corners of the country, including Los Angeles, Ohio and Florida.
“This is leisurewear to be worn all day,” Coggiola-Belza said. “It’s something to be super comfortable, and luckily, with a lot of people being able to work from home, the way we dress is starting to shift.”
In addition to the entrepreneurial drive, Coggiola-Belza said she launched Leaxy to have more of an impact through her professional career. To do that, the company has partnered with the Black Mothers Breastfeeding Association, an organization that aims to assist breastfeeding Black mothers in Detroit, to donate 10% of its profits. According to the CDC, Black infants are nearly 15% less likely to be breastfeeding at three months old than white infants.
“When I think about Leaxy, I think about a mission and goal… to empower women to know their worth and release the inner badass goddess within,” Coggiola-Belza said.
The idea behind Leaxy started in 2017 when Coggiola-Belza had her first daughter Brooklyn, who the company’s tank top is named after. While lying in bed after breastfeeding, she would sleep with a towel over her chest to absorb leaks. Other solutions like disposable pads would get lost in the bedsheets, and, for her, sleeping while constrained by the underwire of a bra was out of the question.
“I was leaking while I was breastfeeding, and I was miserable,” Coggiola-Belza said. “I had one really simple goal. I just wanted to be able to turn on my left side while I slept without having a towel fall off of my chest because I was sleeping with a towel every single night for a year to absorb all of those… breast blotches. I was looking high and low for something that would help me out, and I couldn’t find it so, I said, ‘screw it. I’m going to make my own.’”
Coggiola-Belza bought a sewing machine, and after going through around 20 prototypes, she landed on the design that would become Leaxy. However, that was in February 2020, and pandemic supply chain issues delayed finding the right fabrics and the brand's launch until this month.
With Leaxy off the ground, Coggiola-Belza has plans to unveil new designs and color options to the brand down the line. The company is currently focused on the D2C route. While Coggiola-Belza isn’t ruling retail sales out of the equation, she said the goal is to keep overhead costs and prices for customers low to make the product available to more women. By “pricing people in,” Coggiola-Belza hopes to create a brand identity around support and empowerment for women in their breastfeeding journey.
“What I envision as we continue to build this out is how are we helping to empower and support women in their breastfeeding journey but also how are we helping to support people that are working with Leaxy and our employees in the future,” Coggiola-Belza said.
