The Motherhood Identity Series with The Locket Sisters founder Allyssa Woodford Hughes

One minute, your baby’s small enough to fit on your chest, and the next they’re walking into school with a backpack that looks bigger than their body. One day, they need you for everything and then, slowly, quietly, they start needing you in different ways.

It’s often seemingly out of nowhere that you’re looking at a photo from three years ago wondering how you were ever inside that moment and still somehow missed how small they were. You remember the outfit, the cheeks, the way they held your hand, the way they said a word wrong… You remember the version of you who was probably exhausted, overstimulated, carrying too much and still loving them so hard it could split you open.

It’s also the feeling at the heart of The Locket Sisters, the keepsake jewelry brand founded by Allyssa Woodford Hughes. Built around photographs, memory and connection, the brand began in an intimate way—with Allyssa and her sister at the kitchen table of their childhood home—and grew into something that helps mothers, daughters, sisters, families and grieving parents carry the people they love close.

For Allyssa, a locket is not just jewelry, but also a way to hold onto a person, a season, a relationship, a version of your child, a version of yourself. It’s something tangible in a world where so much of motherhood moves too quickly to fully grasp while it’s happening.

In this issue of The Motherhood Identity Series, Allyssa reflects on becoming a mother at 29, building a business with her sister, choosing a slower and more intuitive pace, and what it means to love our children through every version of who they’ve been, who they are and who they’re still becoming.

I was energetic as a child, wild as a teen, and adventurous in my twenties. I became a Mom at 29 and just turned 43 earlier this month. I have cycled through energetic, wild, and adventurous dozens of times since then, plus more.

Who I am as a Mom is who I was before I was a Mom, too, but it’s just taken over a decade of personal work to integrate every version of me. I imagine more versions of myself will continue to show up, too, if I’m so lucky to keep aging.

Becoming a mother mostly changed how I value connection, because the primitive nature of my unconditional love for them is singular, life-altering, and honest. I value the role I play in their lives so profoundly, and I hope that even as they grow, and I grow, and things inevitably change, because they do and always will, we can preserve our connection, even if it looks different at different times.

I work really hard to not have too big of a rear-view mirror when it comes to my children’s childhood. It’s moving so fast that I can barely take in the full view when I’m looking straight out the dash, but every once in a while a photo will pop up and just take my breath away. I’ll often see a photo and have absolutely no memory of it, which will make me wonder where my brain was that day and how I was doing, and then I’ll have empathy for my old self who was struggled so much when my kids were little but still did such a good job loving them, and then the photo will suddenly mean even more to me because of the era it represents. That is what I want to keep close.

On a very regular basis I feel stunned at how brave and naive my sister and I were. I cannot believe we just started a photography business and then just started a locket business?? Like, that’s honestly crazy! We had no business background, no merchandising or retail experience, never done e-commerce, no clue about shipping logistics and branding and tariffs and 401k law. And yet, I think if we did understand how high we’d need to consistently rise to meet what the business needed from us, we may not have the courage to rise to the occasion in the first place. So what I remember most about the early season with sister at the Locket Sisters is how fortunate we were to be just enough brave and just enough naive in the same moment to take a good leap.

Amy and I must have some kind of cosmic connection in our lives that brought us together as sisters who overlap for a while as business partners. You can be so honest with your siblings in a way that you maybe wouldn’t be with other people (I have another sister, too, plus two brothers). There’s also a desire for preservation when it’s family, meaning my goodness it would be a shame if you lost the relationship with your sister over business. In that sense, I think Amy and I have a deep respect for each other’s careers – she moved on from the Locket Sisters in March of 2020 right as COVID hit to start building her health coaching practice. It’s actually really fun to watch her right now especially because I can tell she’s aligning in a new way that’s lifting her. Can’t wait to see where she takes it.

I think love and connection will always be evergreen, and the entire essence of our jewelry is rooted in both.

Every year my family goes to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness where we carry canoes and packs full of food and go deep into the woods for a few days. I’ve noticed on those trips, when I’m so far from technology and electricity, that I can remember the moments I’m in even more when I pay attention to all of my senses – what does the wild sound like? Is the scent of bonfire or fresh air around me? What do I see? Similarly, you experience a photograph more when you’re holding it, touching it, moving it around between your fingertips. No matter where technology takes us, our primal nature will always have a bias for what we can feel.

So many! Truly, I remember so many and can even picture the faces. One in particular was an order of three lockets for three different Moms, all of whom had experienced the death of one of their children. I didn’t know any of these women at the time. While I was working on those lockets I kept picturing joyful kids playing outside together in a field, it was just like an image in my head while I printed their photos, poured the resin, etc. I later learned that these Moms often say that their kids are all together now, playing and taking care of one another – but even more interesting was that one of the Moms lives on a property that looks almost exactly as I had pictured one when making lockets with photos of their beloved children. That felt really beautiful.

People share really profound things with us in their orders. We have a space where they can tell us about the photograph they chose, and they can check a box about whether or not they want it shared. We hardly share any of them anymore, but we read every single word they write to us. This work has profoundly shifted my interaction with time. Reading stories of hardship and joy and celebration and deep loss and adversity and connection day in and day out invites a person to reflect on what kind of life they’re building, they’re living. I have chosen a slower pace that allows me to be present in my own life because of the impact this work has had on me.

I think motherhood is still teaching me about attachment, separation and letting go. And maybe some of that learning comes from being a daughter, too. Each age and developmental stage is like having a new kid to parent. My kids are almost-14 and almost-12. They’re different now than when they were at 9 and 7, or 4 and 2 even. I wear a locket every day with photos of them at ages 8 and 6, and in that stretch between a keepsake and the dinner table tonight, I can keep with me all the parts of who they’ve been, who they are and who they’re becoming.

That story about my daughter sharing her locket (with a photo of her and I inside) being offered to other students at preschool who missed their own parents was the spark that made my sister say, “We gotta do lockets.” It was like the value of the lockets suddenly clicked in her head; realizing that these are more than just jewelry, that they have the power to bring connection and love right into the present moment, changed everything. Within just weeks of telling Amy that story, we’d launched the Locket Sisters to bring what we were doing for our photograph clients to a larger audience.

Oh I definitely do this way more than my husband on a day to day basis. Although, he does keep a travel journal for us and writes down the details of each day in a little notebook. It’s so fun to read back through and remember each day down to what we cooked on the campfire in the Boundary Waters or what we had to eat after surfing the Pacific Ocean.

Oh my goodness, running this business has forced me to be honest with myself in a way that I don’t know if I’d be forced to do if I’d stayed in the non-profit sector, or any other sector for that matter. Your responsibilities don’t care about your excuses, so I’ve had to wrestle with the ways I stand in the way of the Locket Sisters growth in deep ways. Customers can always go find somewhere else to buy jewelry; my team could work somewhere else – but if I want this business to be a place people choose to engage with, how can I make the energy here something that compels them to stick around? That guides me, and has improved me, in immeasurable ways.

One of our first orders was from someone in Michigan, and I remember thinking, “How do they even know we exist?” This work had a spark right from the beginning – but it also had the same soul, the same focus on what the lockets mean to the people who wear them, as it does today. Despite having my own lockets that mean so much to me, it continues to surprise me how much they mean to everyone else, too.

The hardest part about growing a business while also mothering has been giving myself permission to go at a pace that is outside of capitalism’s demands. There’s always something I could be doing to grow at some suggested pace that someone else has set, but I have already outpaced my own expectations and even my own imagination. Besides, I have such a beautiful life in Minneapolis with my kids and my husband and our absolutely perfect dog. I love my work and have so much respect for the Locket Sisters as a business and an energy, and I think growing in a way that is aligned and led heavily by my intuition, which is kinda weird frankly (or maybe it’s just more feminine and subsequently less common since a lot of people with the hot mic in business are men?) takes some courage, because it’s against the grain. Weirdness aside, choosing a sustainable pace and following my intuition is also likely one of the reasons the Locket Sisters is a healthy business – we’ve kept a focus on what actually matters, which is taking good care of our customers as they choose jewelry that represents some of the most beautiful parts of their lives. When people have a positive experience, and find a keepsake that feels special, they tell more people about it.

That was probably harder, irreconcilable even, before my kids were school-aged. I really struggled with sending them to daycare when they were so little, but also struggled to be around them all the time. I enjoy parenting so much more as my kids grow. Besides, my schedule syncs with theirs really well now – I’m so grateful for this. I coach their basketball teams, the track team, I’m at the band concerts and reading books on the couch when they get off the bus in the afternoons. At the same time, just this morning they went downtown with me to go live on the local CBS morning show to talk about lockets as graduation gifts, and I love that they get to see me do big things like that, too. I was so nervous, and open about being so nervous, but then I got to tell them that sometimes you just have to do things nervously. Setting that example for them matters to me, too.

Something I realized early on was that I really should not follow anyone’s work too closely if our work is too close, meaning that if there’s a jeweler in close physical proximity to the Locket Sisters, don’t keep tabs on what they’re doing. If there’s a keepsake that is similar to what we offer, I don’t follow them too closely either, because when I would watch other businesses or jewelers or brands too closely, I’d start to pay more attention to what I was not doing rather than what I was doing. Instead, I chose to engage more with painters and potters and poets and photographers. I used inspired people as inspiration for myself as a business owner. That’s probably an example of leading with your intuition, too.

I hope that mothers feel special when they open one of our lockets for the first time. Jewelry is so fun to play around with, photographs can be so meaningful, and connection is what makes life rich. Threading these three things together is just a wonderful thing to offer women and all people.

I hope that when my kids reflect back on me during their childhood they understand that their Dad and I (my husband is also a small business owner) tried intentionally to live into our values in all aspects of our lives. I hope they remember that we worked hard and we treated people well, and that riches come in many forms. I hope they remember that I was mostly present, that I loved them well and their friends well and their community well; that I was inspired. And that life is an opportunity to create something beautiful that you really want to live within.

The Motherhood Identity Series exists to spotlight women navigating the real, complicated, and transformative terrain of motherhood—founders, creators, leaders, artists and mothers whose stories challenge how we talk about identity, ambition, and becoming.

If you know someone whose story deserves to be told — or if you’re interested in being interviewed yourself — we’d love to hear from you.

📩 Email Jenn at jenn@milaandjomedia.com with a brief note about who you are (or who you’re nominating) and why their story feels meaningful right now.

We’re always listening.