Before we built anything, we talked to women. This is what we heard.
Yes. Obviously yes. But you already knew that and you still felt the need to ask.
That's the more interesting thing. The fact that so many women quietly wonder if caring about their appearance during pregnancy makes them shallow, vain, or somehow less focused on what's really happening is not a personality flaw. It's a response to a very specific cultural message that pregnancy sends: your body is now a vessel, and vessel-thoughts are the appropriate ones.
The bump is the main character now. Everything else, how you feel, what you want, who you are outside this, is meant to step back.
Where the guilt comes from It comes from multiple directions at once. There's the wellness narrative that what matters most is health, rest, and stress reduction, and that caring about your appearance is a distraction from those priorities. There's the social narrative that a woman who is visibly focused on how she looks while pregnant is somehow missing the point of the experience. And then there's the practical reality that the market has given you almost nothing worth caring about, which makes the desire to look good feel like a personal failure instead of a market failure.
None of these narratives are right. But they're persistent, and they compound.
What the research actually shows We're not the first to document this. Studies on body image during pregnancy consistently find that how women feel about their appearance has a direct effect on their mood, confidence, and mental wellbeing — which in turn affects the quality of their pregnancy experience. This isn't superficial. What you wear all day affects how you feel. How you feel shapes your mental state. Your mental state during pregnancy matters enormously, both for you and for the baby you're carrying.
Caring about how you look is not a distraction from your pregnancy. It is part of taking care of yourself during it.
The thing that no one says plainly You are not a different person because you're pregnant. Your personality, your preferences, the things that make you feel like yourself, none of that has changed. A woman who cared about her clothes before pregnancy doesn't stop caring because she's pregnant. She's been told to, and she's complied, and the result is months of wearing whatever fits and feeling vaguely unlike herself every day.
That's not a small thing. The "invisible hours" we keep coming back to, the day-to-day experience of being pregnant, at home, at work, in transit, are shaped substantially by how you feel in your body and in your clothes.
You're allowed to want to look good. You're allowed to spend money on clothes that make you feel like yourself. You're allowed to care.
be imli exists because of exactly this. The brand is built on a single belief: you're still you, just pregnant. Your clothes should reflect that.
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