Solé Atelier and the Interior Life
Friends and sisters-in-law Carolyn Madigan Espinoza and Mariana Avila Madigan founded Solé Atelier together to help themselves and others be more intentional about integrating their professional goals and interior lives.
Combining their backgrounds, passions, and especially their faith lives, they create products designed to keep busy women organized and in God’s presence. Catholic Women in Business asked them about their company and their inspiration.
What inspired you to start Solé Atelier?
Our journey began a few years ago when we were driving home from an event in Chicago. We were dreaming about a product that could help us live our faith with naturalness and subtlety, but at the same time was beautiful, high-quality, and supported professional excellence. We were striving for a life of sanctity, whether in the boardroom, the chapel, or at the cocktail hour, and knew we needed more concrete tools to keep us intentional in our pursuit.
What ignited the creation of our first product, the Solé Weekly Planner, was having our first babies a week apart and finding ourselves juggling many new responsibilities and needing something to help us stay organized. So, we decided to start Solé Atelier — with a sole intention of being saints, being solely focused on the present moment and task at hand, and always with joy, a little party, aka olé!
2. How did you come up with the name Solé Atelier?
We workshopped it a lot back and forth! Our brand, like our products, is not overtly Catholic, but has deep Catholic roots. Solé plays with the words soul and sole. Soul has to do with our spiritual component, and sole refers to our singular purpose, our end goal, being heaven. We are both Hispanic, so the olé at the end for a little party! Atelier denotes artisanal quality, which is what we hope you experience in each of our products.
3. In a tech-heavy world, what benefits do you see to having a paper planner?
Simply by writing your goals down on paper, you're 42% more likely to achieve them. If that isn't an incentive! But beyond the stats, there's something so personal about writing by hand; you're sharing a part of yourself in putting pen to paper. It also allows you to see more clearly how you think, to brainstorm, and follow a train of thought that's intentional, since you can’t delete it with a keystroke. Simply by creating a daily physical product that is beautiful, we also knew it would more likely attract our attention to employ it. By the end of the year, you have a collection of memories and reflections that you can reflect on.
We designed our planner with weekly and monthly blank spaces for creativity and reflection. We personally use it for journaling during our prayer, and having something off-screen allows us to be more present and not give in to distraction. In desiring to be more present, we additionally wanted a physical pause to not be caught by flashing updates on our phones while we were trying to be intentional about the use of our time. One of our favorite saints, St. Josemaria Escrivá, said, “Time is short for loving!”
4. What are your career backgrounds? How do you divide the leadership tasks of the business?
Carolyn: I have a background in education, marketing, and fashion, and love integrating high ideals with tangible beauty. Helping people to achieve their goals with products that are beautiful and inspiring, but also solve real needs, is important to me and gets me excited to work! In terms of Working Genius, I'm a discerner and galvanizer, so workshopping ideas, words, designs, and getting others to buy in and connect are my strengths.
Mariana: I started at MIT, studying mechanical engineering with a focus in product design, which sparked my passion for creating and improving items that positively impact others day-to-day. After working in aerospace and defense companies, I wanted to take a step back from the technical to explore general management and dive deeper into business and entrepreneurship. I am now pursuing my MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management while working full-time. It has been incredibly fulfilling to combine my product design background with lessons from the MBA at Solé, from the graphic design of our products to the strategy and operations of the business.
Being small, there's a lot of overlap between our roles as co-founders, which we love, as every time we come together, we work to refine the idea or product to something both of us are proud of, whether an article for a magazine, our logo, how we package the planner, etc. We currently live in different countries and balance other work and family responsibilities, so we leverage calls and FaceTime meetings throughout the week to divide and conquer. Our roles are also constantly evolving as we go through different phases of the business journey, from initial product development to store launch to fulfillment and sales.
5. How do you juggle faith, family, and work?
Carolyn’s mom always said, "Put God first, and He'll multiply your time!" This has been so true and has helped to bring order to our days. It necessitates prioritizing time to have a personal friendship with Jesus, so that we're able to serve our families well and do our work to the best of our ability and with the right intention. It also means cultivating time for individual prayer and as a family.
In that sense, we’re working on living an integrated life. The concept of work-life balance can be confusing, and we easily fall into the trap of balancing “working” during the week and “living” during the weekend, as if work were something to be avoided or negative and living were something entirely different. Instead, we’re one person, body and soul, and work is a gift, in the form of whatever responsibility we have in front of us. With that particular lens, we’re able to give our full selves in each moment, offering it all to God, as work and rest both require intentionality on our part.
6. What advice do you have for Catholic women who are trying to improve their time management?
See answer above!
While it might be counterintuitive to add another task to your day, setting aside time to thoughtfully plan is critical. Setting a Top 3 for the week and writing it down helps us from trying to become an octowoman, getting just one more thing done while I'm at it, and focuses our attention and energy on the concrete. It also keeps us from going into checklist mode and completing what is immediate, and instead ensures that our focus is on what’s important, weaving in what is immediate in its proper place.
In alignment with our Top 3, we like to plan out our Golden Hours. It is a tool, designed by OptimalWork, that helps us work toward our highest ideals in a dedicated period of time. It allows us to distinguish between an interruption (which we can welcome) and a distraction (which we should be working to avoid), so that we can fully honor the dignity of those in front of us and the various needs we are called to address in a thoughtful manner.
Finally, setting a daily schedule that's flexible and changes with the seasons of life is crucial. Sometimes this can feel overwhelming because there’s that nagging fear that we won’t keep it, and no one likes to fail! Instead of looking at it as something rigid, it can be helpful to view it as an ideal that we’re working toward. High ideals are for those focused on growth! We added a space for this in the monthly section of the planner, and we use it to figure out when we can work out, clean, work on Solé, meal prep, attend Mass, etc.
7. How does your faith play a part in how you run your business (other than the product, of course!)?
Our faith is what inspired starting Solé, as we wanted a way to be conscientious about living a life of prayer and bringing order to our often hectic days. We knew that if God wasn't first, we're missing the mark.
We have our cheerleaders and older siblings in the faith supporting us! Our Lady as our Patroness, putting the success of Solé in her motherly hands and helping us to strive for excellence out of love. In making big decisions, we go to the Holy Spirit for wisdom and prudence. To make good use of our time (which many times as moms, friends, daughters, students, volunteers, etc., is limited!), we go to Blessed Álvaro del Portillo. In working with the media and sharing Solé with others, Pope St. John Paul the Great, and in finances, St. Nicholas of Bari. In caring for women and working to have an elevated style, we go to Encarnita Ortega, Servant of God. We have so many more friends in heaven, but these are a few of our go-tos!
8. You mentioned living in different countries, and one of your products is Honduran coffee. Why Honduras? Why coffee?
Carolyn: I'm in Honduras, and the coffee is from my husband's family's farm. Our brand is all about finding the divine in the ordinary through products that are inherently good, beautiful, and of high quality. A cup of coffee is something so simple, but to a busy working mom, crucial. At the same time, there's craft and beauty that goes into it. We typically associate that drink with work, intentional meetings, and with a pause. In that vein, it's in line with both our mission and serves as a trigger for planning or praying — while being the elixir of our mornings!
9. What plans do you have for Solé Atelier — what should our readers be on the lookout for?
Our mission at Solé Atelier is to help professionals (from mothers to CEOs and everything in between!) bridge the human and the divine through lifestyle products that foster interior life, exterior order, and spark joy in daily use. We will continue creating products that, in a very personal way, help you stay in the presence of God, but fit naturally and beautifully in every environment. We are still dreaming and listening to our customers to see how we can better help them strive for excellence in the day to day. Have an idea? We’d love to hear it! We encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter, LinkedIn, and social media to stay in the loop about business updates and launches!
10. What advice do you have for Catholic women who are thinking of starting a business?
Go for it! Talk to as many people as possible to test out your idea. We surveyed 100 and interviewed 30 women before deciding on our initial design. From there, we stayed open to iteration. It also helps to have a partner — doing it together multiplies your joy but also your creativity and productivity. Any time we haven't agreed on something, we've gone back and forth until we've been able to workshop it enough to create something we both love. In the end, it is always better than our individual, original ideas.
Beauty in the details, as a way of love, inspires Carolyn Madigan Espinoza to create. With a background in education, management, and fashion, she has served as both an educator and leader in the for profit and non-profit sectors. She is passionate about striving for excellence in all work, from being a wife and mother to owning a company, and has taken all the OptimalWork courses. Volunteering her time to highlight the dignity of women, she has helped lead fashion initiatives and has served on the board of Fashion Matters Chicago, and currently serves on Women of Vision and MAYFA (matrimonios y familias). Solé Atelier is a culmination of her passions.
Mariana Avila Madigan is an engineer and designer who finds joy in turning ideas into reality. She studied mechanical engineering at MIT and is pursuing an MBA at Northwestern, blending innovation with thoughtful leadership. Her work spans engineering, nonprofit work for women in STEM, and supply chain and customer service management. Passionate about supporting professional women, she co-founded Solé Atelier alongside full-time work, graduate studies, and life as a wife and mother of two.