By LYNETTE HAALAND, Four Points News
After the Feehans of Steiner Ranch had their first son nine years ago, Luna was faced with breastfeeding challenges. That experience led to the creation of Legendairy Milk in 2015. The supplement company was started in the couple’s tiny 1,000-square-foot Austin studio with an encapsulator found on eBay. Last year Legendairy moved into its 9,000-square-foot headquarters on Balcones Drive near RM 2222. Today it has 37 employees, a 25,000-square-foot warehouse, and some 55 products which can be found in Target, Walmart and on Amazon as well as hundreds of boutiques.
Being a company founded on breastfeeding, Luna and husband Joe had fun with the decor of their new offices last year. There are pink doors everywhere and the walls are loaded with murals related to womanhood.
“We basically just scrubbed the entire floor. We really tried to bring our personality into it,” Luna said. The cozy lactation room wallpaper is filled with breasts of all sizes and a massage chair for relaxing.
“This is our photography room,” Luna shared during the tour. “This is where we also do TikTok live, so we have a live host who will come every night and talk about products.”
“We have a pretty robust community of moms on Instagram and TikTok and actually Facebook, too. There’s almost a million followers now that we have,” she said. “And really at the heart of it, it’s been about the education and support because motherhood, new motherhood, especially is so isolating.”
Beginnings
Luna and Joe – college sweethearts from University of Kentucky – now share a corner office with a view of the city scape. The couple moved to Austin and began working here and eventually started their family.
“I had my first baby and he was three weeks premature. And I was being pushed to give him breastmilk, that was very important to help him to thrive during that period, but I could not get him to latch for the life of me,” Luna shared.
After she left the hospital, it was hard to find lactation consultant support. “They were kind of like, you’ve been discharged, good luck.”
She got a breast pump rental and was pumping up to 12 times a day.
“It was pretty much my whole life for nine weeks straight. I would latch him on, he wouldn’t latch, he wouldn’t be able to transfer milk, then I would pump, then I would feed that pumped milk to him, and then I’d go and clean bottles, and we’d start the whole process over again,” she remembered.
Luna admits she was “kind of obsessed with making more milk” to help her baby thrive as a preemie. She also noticed that she needed more support. She turned to online pumping and nursing groups on Facebook.
“Honestly, I learned so much from those groups,” she said. Pumping and best practices for maximizing milk production were more taboo a decade ago.
She ended up being an exclusive pumper just because baby Jojo could never properly latch.
Make more milk
Luna also connected with an in-home lactation consultant who recommended an herb called fenugreek to increase milk supply. But she had an extreme reaction where it dropped her blood sugar so low that she could not get out of bed. She was already sensitive to blood sugar fluctuations because of gestational diabetes during pregnancy.
Out of the experience with fenugreek, she started trying to find other options. She knew how to read clinical studies from her pharmaceutical sales background, so she started researching different herbs that women in different countries had been using for centuries. Luna researched historical data and ancestral learnings that had been passed down from generation to generation. She was hopeful to find something relatively unknown to women in the U.S.
Luna ended up ordering herbs like milk thistle and moringa. She started to become her own guinea pig. She would grind up the herbs and put them in an encapsulator machine she bought on eBay for $100.
“I would mix things up and try it out for a couple of days to see if it helped increase my milk supply,” she said. “I ended up finding these formulas that were working for me.”
Create a shop
Luna thought about other moms in her online groups who were struggling and thought her formulas may work for them too. By then Jojo was four-month-olds and she had an idea – create an Etsy shop.
“I’ll make (supplements) in my little studio. This is just a little hobby. If I get one order a month, it’ll be very rewarding for me,” Luna said.
She created fun names and labels to go with her products. The name Legendairy Milk is kind of a play on a dairy cow, she said. “Our milk is legendary, it’s liquid gold, so just a fun little play on words.”
Luna could crank out 40 pills in an hour. She never had any debt because as soon as orders would come in, she would pay for the herbs and supplies.
With all of her research, she was also providing a lot of support to the moms who reached out. “It became almost like I was a therapist/lactation consultant with them,” she recalled.
“Someone in one of those Facebook groups purchased the product and shared it in that group of 20,000 moms and I got 50 orders overnight. I was not ready for that by any means,” Luna shared.
Not long after it was getting very crowded in the Feehan studio. At that point they had two employees filling orders in a space half the size of their current office. Their spare bedroom had boxes piled floor to ceiling. The mail truck would come around and they would fill the whole truck. Then they got to where they were following the mail truck to the post office to send Legendairy mailings.
Stretched
Time for change came about a year into opening the Etsy shop.
Joe told Luna, “You’re stretched too thin, like, we can’t continue this way. You don’t sleep.”
He was right. For that first year, their typical routine was Joe would watch the baby – who was fussy and colicky – when he got home from work as a banker at JP Morgan. He would help make pills until 8 p.m. Then Luna would typically put Jojo to bed. Then she would go make more pills and respond to messages until about 2 or 3 a.m. Then she would get up around 7 a.m. and care for the baby and repeat the routine.
Around then is when they found a manufacturer at a U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulated facility that had a Good Manufacturing Practices certification. This manufacturer took a risk with Legendairy because their first orders were so small, others turned them away. Now, nine years later, Legendairy is their biggest client.
Growth
The company really started taking off in 2016 and in March of 2017, they launched a website.
Legendairy didn’t have a sales person at that point and the demand and following of the products were enough to convince large retailers to carry the line. In 2018, Legendairy got into Target. “They just wanted us on the shelf.”
After 12 years at JP Morgan, Joe retired from his day job in August of 2018.
“I was a banker, so I went from banking to breastfeeding, a natural transition,” Joe said with a laugh. “That’s when all of a sudden we were both full time.” He is chief operations officer and chief financial officer.
“We also launched on Amazon at that point, and then we also had probably about 200- 250 small boutiques around the U.S.,” Luna said. Then in 2023 Legendairy launched in Walmart.
Legendairy has distributors in the Philippines, South Africa and Singapore.
Warehouse space was added as Legendairy grew. They started out in a small 2,000-square-foot warehouse in Pflugerville with a connected office. A couple of years later they moved to another warehouse across the street with about 9,000-square-feet. Then in the spring of 2024 they moved into the 25,000-square-foot space in East Austin and also into the headquarters in Northwest Austin.
Legendairy has launched 55 or so products with 24 just in 2024. Liquid Gold is Legendairy’s top selling product and Sunflower Lecithin, that helps unclog ducks, is the second top seller. Milkapalooza, Pump Princess and Cash Cow are other popular products.
Expansion
Last year the Legendairy team launched women’s health supplements, a lactation powder for cookies or brownies, and a mobile breast pump.
The company is expanding into more women’s health products like with Girl’s Gotta Go, which is geared for urinary tract infection. She’s Thirsty, launched last fall, is a coconut water electrolyte mix which has potassium, zinc, iron and vitamin C. “This can be really supportive when a mom is chronically dehydrated,” Luna shared.
Humor and heart
The Legendairy product development team continues to come up with catchy phrases and product names.
“We bring a lot of humor. I think our packaging kind of speaks to that. And it’s almost an inside joke that you wouldn’t know unless you were breastfeeding, that a mom might just get a little chuckle out of it, just feel a little bit better that she’s not alone,” Luna shared.
“Supplements are not sexy but it’s something that you kind of can look forward to taking because the packaging is clever,” she added.
Legendairy has 37 employees including a lactation consultant who works with moms virtually and in the office.
Legendairy’s customer service team all are certified breastfeeding specialists with a 90-hour training. Team members troubleshoot before recommending any product. The Legendairy social media accounts take that same approach.
Emotional connection with moms has been key to the success of Legendairy.
“I go back to the moms just being such huge advocates for the brand. We go to conferences now and sometimes women will come up to us in tears saying, ‘You saved my breastfeeding journey,’” Luna shared. “We’re meeting moms where they’re at.”
My parents and I are Kurdish and we immigrated to the US from Iraq when I was very young. My parents were driven by the hope that we could achieve the American Dream. For us, it meant the chance to build a better life—a life where hard work, resilience, and determination could lead to opportunities—regardless of where you come from. My journey has been rooted in the belief that here, I could pave the way for something greater—not just for myself, but for my children and future grandchildren.
Our boys are Jojo (aged 9) and Talan (aged 4). We’ve created an environment in our home where breastfeeding is completely normalized. I breastfed both of our children and openly shared my experiences with them, explaining how I nourished and cared for them as babies. As a result, our kids have become strong advocates for breastfeeding, understanding its importance and benefits from an early age. I often tell Jojo that my struggles to breastfeed him were the very reason I was inspired to create Legendairy Milk. Without that challenging experience, the passion and purpose behind what I do wouldn’t exist.
~ Luna Feehan, founder Legendairy Milk
