Sitting Outside My House on the Phone with Pia Baroncini

On the reality of being a mom and an entrepreneur, the importance of authenticity and days where you just say, "F***k!"

Sitting Outside My House on the Phone is a monthly interview series featuring moms doing cool things, their stories, what they’re into and resources for moms!

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When I texted a friend that I was interviewing Pia Baroncini for this series, without skipping a beat she replied, “YESSSS. She’s the hardest working woman in show business!” I would have to agree. If you aren’t familiar with Pia, she’s the creative director of her namesake clothing line, LPA, co-founder of Baroncini Imports, CMO of her husband Davide’s brand, Ghiaia Cashmere, host of the podcast Everything is the Best!, content creator AND mom to Carmela, 4, and Carlo, 8 months. The amount of hats she wears is awe-inspiring and while I’m always curious about how other moms manage to “do it all,” (yes, it’s a myth, but whatever, you get it) especially moms who work outside of the home, Pia has become somewhat of a unicorn to me because, seriously, how does she do it?!

Luckily, Pia’s anything but a gatekeeper. She tells it like it is and in addition to being a bit of an open book, she’s incredibly vulnerable when it comes to talking about the challenges of being an entrepreneur and a parent to two young kids with her 230,000 Instagram followers. She’s discussed everything from her daughter’s autism therapies to the incredible amount of grit that it takes to get multiple businesses off the ground, often from the sun-kissed Pasadena home she shares with her Italian-born husband, kids and mom. It’s refreshing to see someone be so wholly authentic online, especially considering how glamorous that life looks from the outside. Get excited because she’s launching a Substack soon.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s really like to be an entrepreneur, let alone an entrepreneur and a mom, you’re in for a treat. My full interview with the gracious, gorgeous and multi-faceted Pia Baroncini is just below.

C: I ask everyone this, but I'm really interested in how the course of the day goes for different families.

P: I’m always interested in that, too. How’s everybody doing this?! Our alarms go off at seven. I read the news until seven-thirty in bed. Carmela is dead to the world asleep. It's so hard to get her to wake up. I put Charlie Hope on, that's her favorite music. Then I grab Carlo and go into the kitchen. My mom or Davide give him a bottle and I make Carmela her breakfast, my bone broth and cappuccino, and I take my supplements. This morning we turned music on and we were all singing. It was so cute. My mom always does Carmela’s hair - it's part of their little bonding thing.

I get a lot done in a very short period. I either go to drop off or two days a week I have a workout class. Regardless, we're out of the house by eight-twenty. I love doing drop off together with Davide. We go together a lot. Otherwise, it’s a big priority for me to get in my workouts.

Some days are crazy and we'll have meetings. But, the mornings are really beautiful. Listen, we're lucky because my mom is here. A lot of people wouldn't have the patience to deal with living with their mom or a mother-in-law.

C: I have my mom here too, actually.

P: It's honestly really good for everybody's mental health. Good for the kids, good for her. That's how we all used to live. That level of happiness and connection is invaluable to all of our lives. I'm really happy to have it.

C: Same here. How does the rest of the day go?

P: I just hired a part-time assistant to work with me for a couple of months and I told her that we need to start having days dedicated to things because when I record my podcast, ideally, it's in the studio and that's in West Hollywood, so it's a forty-five minute drive and a three hour chunk of my day. I need to bang out three in a day and that's what my day is.

Right now my frustration is that I need to get work done. I need to sit down at my computer and check things off my To-Do list. I need working hours. I do need an office. For now I got a beautiful desk for my bedroom and I need to listen to brown noise on headphones and not have anybody talk to me because I’ll come downstairs and Carlo’s there and, I mean, he's looking at me right now. I walk by him and he's like, “Urggghhhh!” reaching out for me.

C: It's hard when you're working from home, which I do, too. You’re mom and you want to be with your kid, but, you also have things to do!

P: I'm dying to get the space across the street from Davide’s store and make it my office and Baroncini HQ. We laugh because most people in creative positions have assistants and creative time and moodboards and they're touching things. Our output creatively is so quick and vast and we don't have any creative time. We were imagining what things would look like if we had time to get inspired.

C: That's my next question. Once you become a mom you're always looking at everyone else and asking, “How do they do it?” You have so much going on. I need to see behind the curtain.

P: It’s because it's authentically us. Everything that we make for LPA is from vintage dresses that I've worn. I have amazing designers and an amazing buyer. We're not reinventing every collection. We're like, “We should do that dress that sold really well, but do it with this and that.” We get our inspo together, we get organized and I'm really clear with my direction. I’m almost forty and I just started being like, “I'm fucking good at this.” I can go to a meeting and say, “I like that dress, but you should really do it with that skirt or this back.” I'm really good at that and I can see that very quickly.

I talk about this with my cousin a lot. My cousin is brilliant and a forensic psychologist and incredibly successful, but our brains are really different. She's hyper-intelligent and can memorize things and can read things and I can't do that. She says, “I can't make a quick decision.” She'll ruminate over things and I make very quick decisions. That's just a personality thing.

Our prep for launching new Baroncini products is literally us having dinner parties and that's what we do anyway. It’s getting the content from the parties and filming them and doing our cooking show again. I'm having someone do an audit of my Instagram right now to see what works and that'll go to my manager so they can determine the kinds of partnerships we should do. Even if I need the money, I'm going to have to say no to certain things because it muddles people, you know? I want people to trust me and I want people to know that every brand I partner with is authentic and it's a part of us and our story and our thing instead of a money grab. That'll trickle down to what the content looks like for Baroncini and for us, which is basically the same thing. Then the Substack will be a hub for everything.

C: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

P: I go to bed at eleven and wake up at seven. I used to stay up really late. When I was pregnant, I'd be up until midnight doing my work and I will still do that sometimes.

I don’t go to events. Never. I get a lot of invites from PR companies saying, “This new skincare brand is launching,” and I have an automatic response for that: I live in Pasadena. It's an hour away. I value dinner, bed, bathtime. I don't see my kids a lot during the day.

You know what takes up a lot of my time? Is Carmela's therapy for autism. That’s a lot of paperwork and advocating. I also work very well when I'm busy. If I have a light day where I only have a couple of things to do, I won't do anything.

C: Well, you can tell -

P: - I have ADD.

(Both laugh.)

C: I think it's interesting because I’m a person that ruminates and so when I see someone like you, it inspires me to be like, “No, you know what? Why am I ruminating on this stuff? Just make the quick decision.” Because, ultimately, I do know what it is. You have to roll with the punches and be adaptable. Once you become a mom, that's a huge lesson that you learn right off the bat.

P: It's intuition and instinct.

C: What do you think is the hardest part about being a mom and an entrepreneur?

P: Being criticized on the internet. But, actually, I don't care about that anymore because I'm so happy and love my life and my kids are so happy and we're such good parents. So, I take that back. I don’t even dignify that because it's such loser behavior. Those people are so fucking pathetic.

The entrepreneur thing sucks in terms of the financial stuff. Like, I see it being so successful and I know that it will be, but it's hard to do the logistics of this stuff the way that we're doing it and seeing how quickly other people are going to market. Everything's made in Sicily [for Baroncini]. We're working with multi-generational businesses. We're doing things in a very old school way and it's slow work, and it's going to take a little bit longer for the payoff and that's hard.

Davide has no partner and his business is the hardest because he's extremely emotional and very passionate and we have no financial help. People come into the store and they're like, who runs the Instagram? Who does the photo shoots? Who does the production? Who does the design? Who decorated the space? Who works here? And it's him. He’s Italian and culturally, he moves differently than I do and he's more affected than I am. He's had a lot of setbacks that were dumb things from us doing bad business deals. Setting companies up properly, all those kinds of logistics, you need to be very careful.

The creative stuff we can do in two seconds, but neither one of us knows how to run the backend of a business and make sure that the P&L looks a certain way. The more mistakes we make, and we’ve made a lot, they propel us forward in a better way. Now, Baroncini is set up beautifully and Davide is figuring out his stuff. But, we have those moments where we're just like, “Fuck!”

C: It's a juggle, right? Because you guys have two young kids and there are some things that I'm sure you have to compromise on because you want to spend the time with your kids and you can't go as full steam ahead as you’d like. It becomes about prioritizing.

P: It's changed how I raise my children, yeah. I’ve seen a lot of moms need their children to need them and that’s not what we value. We don't want our kids to have anxiety where they're like, “I need to be next to my mom!” We don't have the bandwidth for it. If I'm working, I have to work.

C: You have to create that independence.

P: Because our kids are sleep trained, when Carlo wakes up in the morning, instead of crying, he plays with the furry soccer ball that's in his crib and he laughs and he's so happy in there. He waits for us to come in and I open the door and he stands up and it's very chill. Carmela, too. They're content. That’s the word that I use to describe them. I always want content children.

We took Carmela to daycare when she was younger because I just wanted her to get out of the house. She cried, it was too soon. We tried two or three times and then we were like, she's crying when we show up here, we're never bringing her back. But, when she went to preschool, she didn't cry. She was like, “Later!” That made me really happy for her. With my mom, I would cry when she left and all day I’d be like, “What’s she's doing? I hope she's okay.” I wouldn't sleep at people's houses because I was like, “My mom!” And she lives with me now (laughs).

Pia’s sheet pan chicken.

C: Now you know where she is and what she's doing all the time!

P: I always say we have restaurant children, too. We love for the kids to be apart of what we're doing and to do adult things and know how to behave in public. We go to nice early dinners with them. That’s how I was raised. They don't look at iPhones. Carmela colors and we have conversation and I love that. They're like little adults in that way.

C: You talked a little bit about Carmela having autism and I wonder, what would you say to other parents who are maybe just noticing that their child has a neurodivergent brain?

P: I know multiple people in my life whose kids clearly have autism and they’re in raging denial and because of that really bad behaviors form. I get messages from adults on Instagram all the time saying, “I have autism and my parents were in denial and they got very frustrated with me. I can't imagine what my life would have been like if my parents had done all the therapies for me that you’re doing for her.” I’ve seen every fucking doctor in LA, but the number one thing you can do to get a kid on track is early intervention therapy, which is speech and PT and all of that.

The thing that no one can tell you is what these kids are going to be like when they're older. A lot of the things that we do for her have been huge breakthroughs for other kids and we haven't had that. You can't compare because they're all on their own journey. But, the takeaway is you go to sleep at night knowing that you are doing absolutely everything you can for your child lovingly and you do it with no expectation and you don't future-trip. It’s taken me a lot of therapy to get to that place.

It was a big learning lesson for me because when I was pregnant, I thought, “We're giving birth to a fucking firecracker!” Davide and I have huge personalities. I was like, “This girl’s gonna be fucking smoking cigs on the back of a Vespa at fifteen!” Between us living here and going to New York all the time and Sicily, which is like the wild, wild west, it's like the dirty south of Italy - and we have a very sensitive, very polite, very intuitive, very particular, gorgeous, clean, proper daughter, you know?

C: They check you.

P: Carlo is my dad reincarnated. He’s a beefcake and is like, “What are we doing? Ok, fucking sick!” I love it, it’s unbelievable. They’re very different and I love watching them together. They teach you what you need to know.

C: I know you have to hop off, so I'm going to ask you some rapid fire questions. No one's ever rapid with these, though, so feel free to elaborate.

I love your Instagram food series and I want to know what your go-to Pia Plate is right now.

P: I found a vendor at the farmers market that has really good chicken and I do sheet pan chicken at least once a week with chicken thighs. I do farmers market vegetables, but I always add in slices of lemon, olives, something spicy, like a Calabrian chili, olive oil, oregano. And then I'll do artichokes and zucchini and whatever else. It’s a lot of vegetables, a good protein, some sweet potato and sauerkraut. You need all the little accoutrements. I love to also mix Greek yogurt with anything to make sauce. You can blend it with herbs. You can mix your favorite hot sauce in with it. The yogurt adds protein and makes a delicious sauce.

C: I love that. What's a beauty treatment that you really like and you've seen the most results from?

P: I haven't done anything on my face in a really long time and I need to. I do. My problem area is my stomach. I’ve always held a little pouch of fat there. I call it my PCOS tummy, it’s hormonal weight. It’s been there for so long that it just lives there. I also carried really big with both my kids. I'm very fit and I'm only ten pounds away from my pre-baby weight, but I still have this belly that sits there. I do a lot of EmSculpt and that's very helpful.

C: What’s EmSculpt?

P: It's a machine that basically does thousands of crunches for you, but it also melts the fat. If you don't have fat on your stomach, you get crazy abs.

C: What's the wellness ritual that you subscribe to and love?

P: Breathwork, which is why I love doing hot yoga. I do sculpt and barre classes, but it's in a yoga studio, so there's yoga aspects to it and the breathing aspect of the classes is like meditation for me. Then I have the Open app and I’ll do that. Also therapy. I habit stack a three mile walk with phone therapy. That's lovely. I get vitamin D, I get in my steps, walk my dog, get Carlo outside. It’s amazing.

C: That's awesome. Are you reading anything right now?

P: I'm re-reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Love it. It's the best book ever. I feel like it should be a mandatory high school read.

C: I've actually never read it. What drew you to re-read it?

P: I like re-reading books at different points in my life to see where I am and if I can take in the information more. Outliers has a lot of proven things. But now I have a family, so I can apply them to my children. This came up yesterday in a meeting I had with this couple. The guy was like, “We did our son a disservice with elementary school.” And I said, “You put him in a year early, didn't you?” And he said, “Yes.” And I was like, it's Chapter Two of Outliers! Your kid needs to be the oldest in the class because they can't develop faster. You think you're putting them at an advantage by putting them in early, but you're actually making them incredibly insecure and self conscious because they mentally cannot leap - it doesn't matter how smart your kid is, whether it's emotional or social - they can't develop faster. Malcolm Gladwell talks about it with hockey teams in Canada and the birthday cutoff date. The most successful hockey players are the oldest on the team.

C: This is really helpful for me because I'm gonna put my son in preschool soon and I have the choice between him being older or younger and I didn’t know!

P: You need them to be older.

C: Okay, done! Last question, what's been your favorite “mom moment” as of late? Whatever that means to you.

P: I love going with both of them to the farmers market on Sundays. Carlo’s now big enough to sit in the wagon with Carmela. They just took a bath together for the first time a month or two ago. When he's in the bath she’ll sing, “Baby brother taking a bath, baby brother taking a bath” and he's obsessed with that. He reaches for her. Them just doing stuff together, being in a little wagon or being people together, is the cutest thing in the world.

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That’s all for now! Here if you need anything, if not, see you next week!

xx

C

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All photos courtesy of Pia Baroncini.