'A letter from my Womb'

By Alice Acton, Founder and Previous Owner of WOOM



IMAGE BY BOBBY CLARK

There is a particular kind of quiet that arrives after you've built something with your bare hands and then chosen, deliberately, to let it go. I've been sitting in that abyss for a while now, and it’s probably time I let the feelings escape into words.

WOOM began the way most good things do — not as a business plan, but as an ache. My heart hurt hearing of the unnecessary pain and struggle mothers were enduring while I personally wrangled the memories of my first postpartum deep in depression. I was wading in my own motherhood, stretched thin across the family and film work, and I couldn't find what I was looking for: a place that treated mothers as the point, not the afterthought to the baby. So, I built it and put all the goodness I could find (and afford) on shelves for other women to find more easily than I had.

What I didn't fully reckon with was the cost of building at the same time as mothering. Slowly, the stretching became something else — a fraying. My children started missing their mother in the moments that mattered most, and I felt myself becoming exactly the kind of present-but-absent parent I'd never wanted to be. There wasn't the capital to scale in the way the vision deserved, and I had to be honest with myself about what I was actually willing to trade to get there. With a sense of failure shadowing the truth of my values, I made a choice. Not a small one. I stepped back from the front of the store I'd built, and I stepped fully into the years I'll never get back with my children.

I won't pretend that decision was simple, or that it's made me popular in every room.
Choosing presence over productivity, in a world that still measures a woman's worth by her output, means sitting outside the crowd more often than I'd like — sometimes with judgement pointed my way, sometimes just with a kind of bewildered silence although no more so than as I felt choosing homebirth almost 14 years ago. I've learned, slowly and the hard way, that you cannot have everything at once. For this season, I've chosen my children's need for a present mother over my own need to be seen achieving. That is not a small sacrifice, and it is not one I'll be resentful of when I look back. Motherhood is the ultimate example of creation and creating I continue to do. 

Two births at home taught me things no board meeting ever could. They taught me what mothers are actually capable of, how much power lives in a woman who is trusted and supported through the raw, unfiltered work of bringing life into the world. Motherhood has been the truest initiation I've ever gone through — more honest, more demanding, and more clarifying than anything I built with a spreadsheet. My births were simple but my postpartum's were harrowing, I walked through fire and dug through the trenched to be here, my babies and I thriving in health and connection.

IMAGE BY ALICE ACTON FOR FROM ONE DAY

So — why hand WOOM to someone else, rather than fold it quietly and walk away?

Because the vision was never mine to keep, it was larger than me and by passing it on, felt like the feeling of failure dissolved and transmuted. In new hands, the goals can be reached, smashed even, and the purpose of WOOM remains strong. I always saw WOOM becoming the ‘Mecca’ of motherhood — a place where a woman could walk in and leave with only what she truly needed, supported by highly trained staff who know the products inside out; where naturopaths, TCM practitioners, physios, doulas, lactation consultants and midwives could sit alongside the retail floor, not as an afterthought but as the whole point. Even in WOOM's earliest months, I watched that impact ripple out in real feedback from real mothers  — fewer traumatic births, gentler postnatal seasons, women who felt less alone. That's the metric that mattered to me. Retail was only ever the vehicle.

That vision is now in Sarah's hands, and if anything, I'm more excited for what comes next than I was at the very beginning. What I hope stays woven into WOOM's foundation — no matter how it grows or changes shape — is this: that it will always exist for the mother first. Not the baby. The mother. Because a well-supported, deeply nourished mother is the single most undervalued resource in the whole conversation around infant wellbeing. Babies need well mothers, and I hope WOOM never forgets that truth, even as everything else evolves around it. 

IMAGE BY ALICE ACTON

As for who I am now — I'm still working that out and I think I've now made a kind of peace with not needing a tidy answer. I'm a mother. A partner. A friend. I pick up a camera more than I used to, I find myself on film sets some weeks, and there's a paintbrush I keep eyeing from across the room. I'm a person who conjures ideas faster than I can chase them, and I've stopped apologising for that restlessness — it's simply how I'm built. Maybe one of these threads soon becomes something more. I'm not in a hurry to find out but I’d love you along side me when it does.

Thank you for building this with me, in whatever way you did — as a customer, a follower, a fellow mother reading along. Watch this space, and watch WOOM. I have a feeling both of us are only just getting started.

ABOVE PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALICE ACTON 

To explore more of Alice's work, and stay connected to her as she moves through her next chapter.
You can reach out to her via the following link: https://www.aliceacton.com/

Or follow her on socials: @aliceacton