Month: July 2026

Stitchy founder Ange Douglas reflects on navigating single motherhood and redundancy to build an agency where parents never have to compromise or apologise

​Motherhood in advertising has long been an unspoken challenge – a career-defining crossroads where ambition is too often questioned, and support systems fall short. And while the industry has made progress in acknowledging the realities of working parents, tangible change is still slow, leaving many mothers to navigate the journey alone.

In this instalment of Motherland in Adland – the series founded by NERD’s Milana Karaica in partnership with LBB – we hear from Ange Douglas, founder at Stitchy.

She reflects on navigating a sudden redundancy and becoming a single mother just before her son was born. Here, she explains how those challenges sharpened her ambition and pushed her to build an agency where parents never have to compromise, apologise, or feel guilty for putting their children first.
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When I was pregnant with my son, I thought I knew exactly what the next chapter of my life would look like.

I’d become a mum, take a year off on maternity leave and then go back to work. That was the plan.
But life had other ideas.

When I was seven months pregnant, my marriage ended. Overnight, I found myself navigating a completely different life to the one I’d imagined. Becoming a first-time mum is overwhelming enough, but becoming a single mum before my baby had even arrived wasn’t something I’d ever planned for.
Like most new parents, those first few months were a blur and I was very much in survival mode. Learning how to do it on my own, day by day and eventually my little boy and I found our rhythm.
When the year came around, I felt ready to get back to work. I’d found my footing as a mum and was ready to keep building a life for my little boy and me.

Then, a couple of days before I was due to return from maternity leave, I was made redundant. At the time, it felt like just another reminder of how unfair life can be sometimes.

But looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened.

A couple of jobs later, while juggling being a mum and trying to find my place in the world of work again, I realised that somewhere along the way, motherhood had completely changed the way I thought about work.

Before my son, I had accepted things I wouldn’t ever accept now. Toxic workplaces. Long hours just because that’s what everyone did. Days off that weren’t really days off. The expectation that work always came first. Giving everything to businesses that expected more and more, but rarely anything back.
I never really questioned it.

Motherhood made me question all of it.

For the first time, my time wasn’t just mine anymore. Every unnecessary late night meant less time with my little boy. Every expectation to work on a day off meant missing moments I could never get back.
When you’re responsible for someone else, you become much clearer about what actually deserves your time and energy.

I realised I wasn’t willing to keep giving everything to businesses that saw people as replaceable.
I’d spent years helping build other people’s businesses.

Now I wanted to build something myself, something different than what I had experienced before.
What I would say is that there’s always this idea that you should wait for the right time to start a business.
When I started Stitchy, I was rebuilding my life, navigating family court and raising a toddler. My personal life was incredibly stressful and, on paper, it probably looked like the worst possible time to start a business.

But there is no perfect time. If I’d waited until life felt calm enough, Stitchy wouldn’t have happened.
Motherhood made me trust myself more than I ever had before. It made me more resilient, more decisive and much less afraid of taking risks. Once you’ve navigated becoming a single parent, starting a business doesn’t feel quite so scary.

A year and a half later, Stitchy is going from strength to strength, but the biggest thing it’s given me isn’t the success.

It’s the flexibility and freedom to parent my little boy exactly how I want to.

To be there for the important moments. To take time off when he needs me. To never have to ask someone else’s permission to be a parent.

There’s so much pressure on working mums. People expect mums to work like they don’t have kids and raise kids like they don’t have a career. It leaves you feeling like you’re failing at work because you’re trying to be a good mum, or failing as a mum because you’re trying to build a career. It’s an impossible standard that asks women to constantly compromise, apologise and feel guilty.

One of the biggest reasons I started Stitchy was because I wanted to build the kind of workplace I’d spent years looking for but never found. One where becoming a parent wasn’t seen as an inconvenience. Where people could build ambitious careers without feeling like they had to sacrifice everything else that mattered to them.

We have parents in our team, and they will never be made to feel guilty for putting their children first. If their kid is ill, they stay at home. If it’s sports day, they go. If they need to leave early for parents’ evening or a doctor’s appointment, they don’t have to justify it.

When we stop pretending life only happens outside work, we build better cultures and, ultimately, better work.

Too often, flexibility is treated as a favour rather than a way of working. Too often, women return from maternity leave feeling grateful for things that should simply be the norm. Too often, we celebrate resilience when we should be questioning why people had to be resilient in the first place.
Motherhood didn’t make me less ambitious. It just made me much clearer about the kind of business I wanted to build.

For me, success is building a business I’m proud of while still being there for the moments that matter most.

I hope one day agencies like Stitchy won’t feel different.

I hope trusting people, recognising they have lives outside work and making space for both ambition and parenthood simply becomes normal.

Because it should be.