Katherine Wintsch, founder and CEO of The Mom Complex and author of “Slay Like a Mother” (Photo by Sarah Walor)
Katherine Wintsch has built her career on marketing to mothers. She’s the founder and CEO of The Mom Complex, a research and marketing firm that helps develop new products and services for companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and Walmart. And now she’s a published author with a book she hopes will empower women.
Released in March, “Slay Like a Mother” combines the story of her personal reckoning with insights and research gleaned through her work with The Mom Complex. Wintsch’s hope is that the book will encourage women to shed their masks of perfection and talk openly about their struggles. “This book is not a parenting book,” Wintsch says, “it’s about how to be a whole human being.”
Behind the Facade
Wintsch, 42, grew up in Richmond and attended Hermitage High School. She was a bubbly, popular gymnast and cheerleader who got good grades and “checked all the boxes of traditional happiness,” she says. But “it was a facade.”
She never felt whole, and instead she looked to others for approval. “I knew what people wanted, and I delivered,” she says.
Wintsch showed interest in advertising and marketing while in high school and recalls how her mother would cut out newspaper articles about the Martin Agency and leave them on her bed for her to read. “I wanted to work at the Martin Agency since I was 15,” she says.
She majored in marketing at James Madison University, where she met her husband, Richard. Before graduating, Wintsch applied for a job at the Martin Agency, but was told she needed to attend VCU Brandcenter before they would hire her. So she did, earning her master’s degree in strategic planning.
Wintsch started at Martin in 2002 as a strategic planner, and soon she was putting in 10- to 14-hour days, sometimes working 80 hours per week. “I liked exceeding people’s expectations,” she says. “That fueled me.”
With each success, she wanted more, and by age 27 she was one of the agency’s youngest-ever vice presidents.
In 2006, at age 29, Wintsch was part of the team that pitched for and won Walmart’s $40 million advertising business — she delivered the Martin Agency’s final pitch at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
After she flew home, she discovered she was pregnant.
Two weeks later, the Martin Agency learned it had won the Walmart account.
The Mom Complex
Daughter Layla was born in 2007, and after a three-month maternity leave, Wintsch went back to work. She acknowledges that she was fortunate to be able to hire an au pair to help. “I had a lot of support,” she says, including from husband Richard.
Even so, motherhood was hard. Wintsch was traveling to Arkansas frequently, and when she got home, she was on duty as Mom. As she confronted the realities of motherhood, she began to reexamine the way advertisers spoke to women. After giving birth to her son, Alex, in 2009, she met with the Martin Agency’s top leaders “and told them how much marketing to women sucked,” she recalls. “It was very idealized, glamorized and glossy. I said, ‘This is not my life at all.’ ”
Out of that conversation, The Mom Complex was born in 2010 as a think tank and market research arm of the Martin Agency, with Wintsch at the helm.
The first big project was for Asda, a British supermarket chain owned by Walmart that asked moms across the U.K. to download an app to track their pleasure and pain points throughout the day. But as Wintsch was gathering the pain points of mothers across the U.K., she was also tracking her own. “I realized the life I was living was not sustainable and that I was not happy or free,” she says.
As she writes in “Slay Like a Mother,” “I put on a mask and held on to it like it was my lifeline — a dirty secret that saved me from exposing my struggles. It kept me from having to confess, ‘I’m working 80 hours a week while shouldering household burdens, and it never feels like I’m doing enough.’ ”
She first shared her struggles publicly in 2013 during the first TEDxRVA event in Richmond in a six-minute speech, “Unmasking Motherhood.” She received a standing ovation, and the video has been viewed more than 45,000 times.
Wintsch’s role with The Mom Complex gave her message extra resonance: Here was an expert on modern motherhood experiencing the same things she was exposing in her research. She had found her voice.
Wintsch relaxes at home on a Saturday with son Alex, 9, and daughter Layla, 11, after Layla's early-morning swim practice. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Slay Like a Mother
Wintsch and the Martin Agency parted amicably in 2014, with Wintsch purchasing the company from them and repaying their initial investment. She began writing a blog, “In All Honesty,” in 2014, with the idea that she might one day write a book to share insights from her personal experience and her market research on moms.
It took Wintsch four years, two agents, 23 rejections from publishers, and four book proposals before she received an offer from a publisher in summer 2017.
Her business partner, Lauren Fitzgerald, says “Slay Like a Mother” legitimizes The Mom Complex’s methods. “All of that information collected in the book comes from the research methods nobody else has to get women to be really honest about how they live their lives,” she says. “The only way we can make motherhood easier is getting people to understand what the problems are.”
With “Slay Like a Mother,” Wintsch’s career has come full circle. The book is sold at Walmart, and earlier this week she returned to Bentonville to deliver a keynote during the Bentonville Film Festival. While she’s enjoying the excitement of seeing her book go out into the world, she has no plans to write another anytime soon.
“It’s cool to be an author,” she says, “but I’m more proud that I fixed myself.”
Read the complete article in the May issue of Richmond magazine, on newsstands now.
Never miss a Sunday Story: Sign up for the newsletter, and we’ll drop a fresh read into your inbox at the start of each week. To keep up with the latest posts, search for the hashtag #SundayStory on Twitter and Facebook.
