When Rye resident Patrice Meagher had her first baby in 2009, New York state laws didn’t mandate workplaces to have designated areas for working parents to pump.
She began breastfeeding her baby as an infant, and continued even after she returned to work as a commercial real estate broker in 2010. But pumping her breast milk at the office proved easier said than done.
“It was very difficult to pump at work in general,” Meagher, now a mother of four, said. “I didn’t make it very long pumping because it was so cumbersome and inefficient.”
Between all the steps involved in the task and not having a designated pumping space, Meagher recalled gawking at the inefficiencies of the overall process. She described packing the breast pump parts, bringing them to work, sterilizing them, assembling them, pumping, breaking down the parts, storing the milk, and repeating that a few more times each day.
She and her coworkers would oftentimes pump in storage closets, an office if one was available, or even while sitting in a bathroom stall.
“There are a lot of minutes and time spent on this, and as a working parent I became obsessed by efficiencies,” Meagher said. “There is an extreme amount of steps that go into it.”
Creating a system to alleviate some of the stress of breast pumping at the office, she said, is where the idea for her Manhattan-based company MilkMate was born.
A construction-free workplace lactation room, MilkMate is one of the only products of its kind.
It’s a multi-user pumping space fully equipped with an FDA-cleared breast pump and pre-sterilized and pre-assembled recyclable breast shield kits. The rooms also feature modular furniture to enhance the space – including a pumping chair, a milk storage fridge, a recycle bin, and more.
“We wanted to make it possible for a woman to bring absolutely nothing with her in order to pump at work and that’s what we’ve done,” Meagher said. “But the inspiration was really about helping other working moms.”
