Turning the false tradeoff into a win-win: A new look and feel for Parentaly

Did you notice something a little different about Parentaly today? Maybe our website seems sleeker. Or our logo looks a little different. Perhaps our colors seem more modern and sophisticated.

Don’t be alarmed! Welcome to the exciting update of our brand identity. 

We’re still the same company with the same mission to build the best parental leave experience, for everyone. But we’ve evolved our look and feel to better represent our current messaging and product offering. 

Read more to learn about why we decided to update our brand now, how our product offering has changed, and what the new brand represents.

Why now: Our company evolution

I started Parentaly after my own personal struggle of going on parental leave feeling stressed and fearful about the impact of my leave on my career, and returning to work to a complete disaster. 

After learning that this experience was much more common than I had realized – and perhaps even the norm – I had the conviction to partner with some of the best career coaches to develop a parental leave coaching program. It was a small and scrappy small business with a homegrown website, and I sold our program as an employee benefit to some of the most progressive HR leaders in the country.

Fast forward five years. We’ve coached thousands of expecting and returning parents, partnered with some of the largest and most influential employers in the world.  We’ve also built a loyal brand following of tens of thousands of HR leaders and working parent advocates. 

We’ve coached thousands of expecting and returning parents, partnered with some of the largest and most influential employers in the world.  We’ve also built a loyal brand following of tens of thousands of HR leaders and working parent advocates. 

And the results have been phenomenal across companies of different industries – 97% of alumni say Parentaly helped them feel more confident managing their career and 87% said because of Parentaly, their team will be much better supported during their leave.

How did we get here? As companies are taking the wonderful step of increasing their parental leave policies, these policies are backfiring because they disrupt business continuity and actually slow down the career trajectories of employees taking leave. 

But experts and researchers have found that it’s possible to reverse these trends and create positive outcomes if companies provide programming to support expecting parents, managers and the broader teams who are impacted by parental leaves.

In other words, policy and programming should go hand in hand. 

Becoming a parent is more than an incredible personal milestone. It’s arguably one of the most important moments in an expecting parent’s career as they step away from their role for a meaningful time period and reintegrate as a new parent. Their leave also deeply impacts the coworkers who cover for that individual and the manager who is responsible for leading through their absence. 

Our parental leave program turns all of these parental leave challenges into opportunities for growth, acceleration and positive momentum – for parents and their employers. 

What’s changed: A new era for Parentaly

Career coaching remains the cornerstone of our offering, but over the past few years we’ve built an entire ecosystem of support for the expecting parent, their manager and their team. 

We continue to believe in the power of coaching to help individuals prepare for their leave and reintegrate as working parents. At the same time, we know that managers play a critical role in this experience too. 

In fact, 74% of new parents say that their manager had the biggest impact on their return-to-work transition. That’s why we built our corporate manager training program, to teach managers how to demonstrate empathy through the parental leave journey as well as the tactical steps they’re responsible for before, during, and after leave.

We’ve also found that live, synchronous support paired with asynchronous learning and resources is the optimal way to support our participants. At the end of 2023, we launched a new digital toolkit for expecting and returning parents that's integrated with our core coaching program, as well as a version of the toolkit for their manager. 

The Parentaly toolkit provides a dynamic checklist, actionable steps and guidance on what to do and when, as well as a library of templates and resources. For example, an expecting parent can discuss and flesh out their career goals with their Parentaly coach and then use their toolkit to access a conversation guide to help them communicate those goals with their manager.

Lastly, as we’ve partnered with leading global organizations that have distributed employee populations, we’ve expanded our coaching network beyond the United States to broader North America, Europe and Middle East and Asia regions. This way, our career coaches can align with employees’ time zones as well as cater to local and cultural norms. 

Our parental leave program turns all of these parental leave challenges into opportunities for growth, acceleration and positive momentum – for parents and their employers. 

What’s next: What our brand represents

Our new brand represents where we are today and where we’re headed next. The exercise of reimagining our brand identity helped us crystallize our long-term vision to transform the false tradeoff between parenthood and career into a true win-win for parents, their managers, and their teams. It also helped us define six key pillars for our brand:

1. Empowerment: Parents can excel in their careers and in parenthood
2. Inclusivity: Gender-neutral programming, relevant to all paths to parenthood
3. Expertise: Resources created by skilled professionals with specialized knowledge
4. Innovation: A new infrastructure to support the parental leave experience
5. Synergy: Addressing the mutual needs of parents and their employers
6. Advocacy: A brand voice dedicated to championing working parents

Visually, the brand embodies our product offering: fundamentally human, as seen through the intentional use of photography, with more modern and tech-forward elements as we expand our digital experience. It strikes the balance of maturity and sophistication to match our expertise in parental leave, with authenticity and personality, which are important to our brand voice.

Thank you for being a part of this new chapter! Our new brand is more than just a facelift - it’s who we are and a demonstration of our continued commitment to our mission. It’s a living organism that will continue to grow and change with feedback from our incredible audience.