Parenting Is Easier Outside, but Brands Are Still Leaving Moms in the Parking Lot 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦

This feels vulnerable to share, but I have a fear that if or when I decide to become a parent, I’ll lose the adventurous parts I love about my life right now.

I love taking off for a 4 hour mountain run without having to ask permission. I love popping out of the house on a random Wednesday and heading up to the ski resort without telling anyone how long I’ll be gone, because I don’t know. I love an impromptu endurance challenge day where I can say “let’s go gravel bike this weird road and see if it goes” and chasing darkness home, just because I can.

And yet, I’m turning 34 next month and am more than kid-curious. I can envision a life with a kiddo of my own, and I also dearly love the freedom I currently enjoy. I know a LOT of other people my age are having similar battles in their heads about how to keep the passions we love and have the type of family we want. But I don’t see outdoor brands talking about it.

Julie Bacon, founder of Mothership Collective, built a community of over 10,000 outdoorsy moms and over 160 September 2026 outdoor events — in just over a year. Clearly, there’s a huge market opportunity for outdoor brands to connect with moms.

You can listen to my chat with Julie here. Most of that convo is personal story. This post expands on the brand side; why I think more brands need to tap into the magic of outdoorsy moms.

5 Strategies Your Outdoor Brand Should Use to Connect with Outdoorsy Moms

1 | Pregnancy and parenthood content will help moms and moms-to-be trust you over other brands. 🤝

Julie was one of the first in her friend group to have a kid. There was nobody in her phone who’d already done it and kept up a passion for mountain biking. So she turned to Google, and Google did not come up with much.

What Julie eventually found was a Juliana blog post from one of their athletes about mountain biking through her whole pregnancy. When she found it, she read it as a “permission slip, that it was okay to do what I was doing and feel how I was feeling.” She referenced it throughout pregnancy while continuing to mountain bike.

ONE piece of athlete content, published on a bike brand’s blog, became the most important media in a customer’s entire first pregnancy. She remembers the brand and named it to me on a podcast years later, unprompted, while pregnant with her second.

Brands ask what content moves someone. The answer is the media that finally shows up when she’s scrolling anxiously in bed at 11pm and finding nothing relatable.

Your content helps more than pregnant people — don’t forget about who Julie calls “cosmic aunties”! Cosmic aunties are folks in the Mothership who don’t have kids (yet or ever) but who support the community and its values.

I myself am a cosmic auntie. I also went to Google looking for evidence that I could keep up my sports after becoming a parent, and the Mothership popped up. What doesn’t pop up is a lot of brand media. But what DOES — like the Juliana blog post — sticks in my mind as inspiration and a resource for the future, so you bet I’ll remember Juliana over other bike brands.

Right now, a woman is deciding whether the sport you sell will survive the next chapter of her life. You can start shaping that decision years before there’s even a baby. Your pregnancy and parenthood content becomes the decision-maker.

2 | You’re not scared of the campaign, you’re scared of the comments. But loyalty is greater than blowback. ❤️

Julie’s read on why brands avoid pregnancy content: every woman’s experience is nuanced, pregnancy is loaded with taboo, and they’re scared of the pushback. And we get it — public pushback isn’t imaginary!

Mothership once shared a maternity shoot of a pregnant climber in a full body harness, laughing on the wall. Inside the outdoor world it landed great: inspirational, relatable. The second it traveled outside the community, hundreds of critical comments: How irresponsible! Why are you putting your baby in danger! You don’t deserve to be a mother!

Sadly, I’ve heard many versions of this story. When I interviewed Caroline Van Hemert, author of The Sun Is a Compass, she talked about sailing the Inside Passage with her two kids and writing about it for the New York Times. The public response included plenty of How dare you take your kids somewhere so dangerous. Her answer: riding in a car is more dangerous than this adventure.

In both cases, pregnancy/parenthood media went viral. It performed. And more than vanity metrics: Every time Mothership posts a pregnant woman doing something awesome outside, women message Julie to say “I love this, we need this. I was scared to post this when I was pregnant, so here’s the photo I never shared.”

The out-of-the-industry blowback and the insider loyalty are from the same event. Yeah, it’s tough to get critical comments when you put an active pregnant athlete in a campaign.

But beyond that are thousands of active moms starving for that very content, and your brand supporting those customers shows them you’re trustworthy and cheering them on.

(Here’s a good example by Patagonia: The “Coming to Term” film featuring pro runner Clare Gallagher’s pregnancy, including video thumbnail of a trailside pee :) )

3 | Pregnant consumers are doing your R&D. Use that to your advantage. 📊

Nobody asks the woman athlete before yelling at her. Julie’s protocol while riding pregnant: flat pedals on all her bikes, no clipping in. Hydrating aggressively. Bringing more snacks. An assessment every single day, where she decides whether she feels like getting on the mountain bike, or wants a road ride, or gravel, or something more mellow.

All of that is also somebody’s product category: Someone produces those pedals and has never once said the word pregnancy in a product description. Someone makes that hydration mix and has never published postpartum guidance for it. Someone makes the bibs that stop working over a belly and the pack that stops sitting right. Someone sells the gravel bike a rider buys specifically so she can keep riding through month eight, and has no idea that’s a use case.

You can’t label a sport too risky for a pregnant person just because it’s a sport with risk. Julie’s point is that women who’ve done a sport consistently for years are exactly the people making responsible modifications.

They’re already doing the R&D. They’re just doing it in private group chats, because your brand won’t put it in writing.

Publish the modifications. The specifics are what turn a scary photo into a competent one, and they cost you nothing but courage.

4 | Your competition isn’t another brand, it’s the predatory five-step ab plan. 🙄

As soon as the algorithm knows you’re pregnant (we’ve all heard the stories of it knowing before you do), you get blasted with media meant to get you to spend money. The five-step plan so your abs never look like you had a baby! The three-month program to be the strongest you’ve ever been, while not sleeping! An entire industry capitalizing on new parents at the tenderest stretch of their lives!!!

And it’s easy to get sucked into. Of course an athlete wants to keep their muscles and endurance. Of course they want to keep the 3-hour workout on Sundays, even with no sleep in the first few months of baby’s life. Of course they want to purchase a “simple solution” to every damn aspect of their lives being shaken up forevermore. But most Instagram promises are predatory, false claims, bandaids without true healing.

Julie’s coping strategy is to turn it off and read romantic fantasy novels at night. My tip is that somewhere in your Instagram settings you can block specific topics from your algorithm (Google it). Both of us are basically suggesting algorithm escapism.

Your customer’s default posture toward pregnancy marketing is make it stop. She is actively filtering, toggling off settings, throwing the phone at the wall. She has been trained by months of shame-based advertising to assume you’re another one of them.

You can stand out against the shitty pregnancy/postpartum marketing. Share real stories of women athletes who have lived it. Post tips for using your existing products and gear throughout different phases of life. Publish resources for women to continue being active customers of your awesome brand.

The more predatory content the algo pushes, the more women leave the sport frustrated and sad. The more brands that lead the way, the more consumers stay in the sport or even join the sport.

5 | The mom who keeps her sport post-baby is your customer for the next 20+ years. 💰

Julie rode the Great Divide from Mexico to Canada in 2022 (roughly 3,000 miles and 200,000’ of climbing!). She calls it the biggest trip of her life and her last big goal before getting pregnant. Ask her whether mountain biking made her a better mom and there’s no hesitation. Yes. She explains that so much of parenthood is type two, where you’re out there suffering in the wild wondering why we’re here and a few miles later it all makes sense.

It’s the line that most stuck with me from our chat: Parenting is so much easier outside. Julie and her partner brought their 2 year old rafting and she had the time of her toddler life. They camped for a week on the beach in Baja and her daughter couldn’t get enough of the sand and fishing and water. Her kid is already being primed for decades of outdoor experiences.

The Outdoor Industry Association’s 2026 Outdoor Participation Trends Report states that in 2025, women hit a record participation rate of 53.4%. Participation among kids ages 6 to 12 grew 5% to 22.6 million. Somebody is driving those 22.6 million kids to the trailhead, buying the small-size rain jacket, and replacing the bike every eighteen months as they grow.

The woman who keeps her sport through pregnancy is the one who takes her kids outside for the following 18+ years. She is the highest-value customer in the sport. But today, at the exact moment she’s considering quitting, the industry meets her with total silence, not inspiration.

You’re not deciding whether to make a pregnancy campaign. You’re deciding whether to be a trusted resource when a lifelong athlete works out if she’s still welcome in the next phase of life.

Let’s help pregnant/postpartum parents get outdoors this fall.

💡 Inspo for brands:

• Put an active pregnant athlete in a campaign this year. Not a cutesy staged bump photo at the trailhead. Her literally doing her sport.

• Publish the modification guide. Flat pedals, hydration, the daily go/no-go call, what fits over a belly and what doesn’t. Interview three athletes and print what they say. Simple!

• Audit your last 20 posts. How many people in them are visibly pregnant or postpartum? If it’s zero, that was a decision, even if nobody remembers making it. Make another decision.

• Name the hard parts out loud. As a parent, you might not sleep all night, and the sunrise is beautiful in the morning. Both can be true. The glamorized, sanitized version is why she doesn’t trust you (yet).

• Count the cosmic aunties. Scope your content for everyone deciding whether your sport survives their next chapter, not just the customers who are currently pregnant/parents.

• Sponsor the community. Mothership and Rally the Village exist. Back them, amplify them and any other amazing communities.

💡 Inspo for the rest of us:

• Post the photo you were scared to post. Tag @the.mothership.collective!

• Block the topics that drag you down. Get in your Instagram settings and shift your algo if pregnancy/postpartum/parenthood content is driving you nuts.

• Tell a brand when they get it right. The more of us who celebrate progress, the faster culture will shift.

• Text the new mom in your group and invite her to the ride. Or the hike, or the surf, or the climb, or the Rally the Village event.

There’s a lot from my conversation with Julie that didn’t fit this post’s focus. We talked about matrescence and the identity shift. About body image when your body is the instrument. About tearing her abs backcountry snowboarding while pregnant. About her pep talk for the mom in the trenches, which is that she doesn’t have to wait.

And one of my favorite sentences she said: “Your kid’s childhood is also your parenthood.”

I still have a lot of brain drama to weed through around the parenthood decision. But talking with Julie showed me there are countless parents out there who found ways to keep all their favorite outdoor passions and be a parent at the same time. It might look different in different chapters of life. But you can always get a little bit wild.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Julie Bacon on See Her Outside. And then send it to a parent OR a cosmic auntie. :)