Earlier this month, when Lauren Conrad posted a photo of her new haircut—a lobbed-off version of her widely admired blond locks—her 6.3 million Instagram followers practically became unhinged. The simple snap received more than 325,000 likes and nearly 3,000 comments. This is the power of the former MTV reality star.
But Conrad, who gave birth to her first son with husband William Tell in July, practically gave a verbal shrug to the uproar. “Less hair is less time,” the busy mom and founder of The Little Market responded. “I don’t have time for a lot of hair.”
Other things besides her hairstyle have changed, too, since Conrad has begun juggling her career and motherhood. As the cofounder of The Little Market, an online business selling ethically sourced products made by artisans around the world that empowers and supports women, Conrad has spent the past four years traveling internationally to source products. This could mean anything from Tunisian ceramics to hand-blocked quilts. Before she started this journey with her cofounder Hannah Skvarla, Conrad admits she hadn’t traveled much outside the United States. But since the birth of her son, Liam, she has since put travel—though certainly not work—on hold.
Case in point: Conrad, whose life is now more appropriate fodder for HGTV than reality television, recently finished a kitchen renovation project in her Los Angeles home. “I really like kitchens to be bright and light, so I just did it in all white and brass. Actually, my contractor made fun of me because I had white subway tile, and he called me boring, which is fair,” she says, laughing. “So for the first time, I brought color into my kitchen! I brought in a very pale blue-green-gray color as a little hexagon backsplash, so that was a big step for me.”
Conrad alternates, she says, between decorating her own homes in Southern California with or without a designer. “I’ve redesigned several times, and I’ve done it completely on my own and also with a designer to do the heavy lifting where I knew what I wanted and would show her pictures and say, ‘I want this,’ and she would find me several options at different price points,” she explains. “So I’ve done it all different ways. I enjoy doing it myself and doing it slowly if I can—you don’t want to open a catalog and find your living room layout on one page.”
One way Conrad prevents this (besides slapping her own hand when she finds herself using too much white), is to fill her home with personal items. “I think your home should be comfortable and filled with things that make you happy and really represent your aesthetic,” she says. “I think it’s fun when you get to learn about a person when you go into their home, or on your shelves you have things you’ve acquired over the years of travel, or gifts handed down from the family. It’s really fun to put together a home, and it should represent you and the things you love.”
Thanks to her work with The Little Market, which has a home decor–heavy selection and now works with 56 artisans, this is easy for Conrad. “I definitely have a lot more pillows,” she says, laughing. “I never really paid much attention to decorative pillows, but that’s something we do a lot of in The Little Market because so many places have these amazing textiles but they’re not really sure how to sell them. Pillows have become our go-to when we see these beautiful fabrics, like, ‘Let’s make a pillow with it, because I want it on my couch!’”
The company has also simplified the art of gift giving for Conrad, whether it be for a friend or significant other (she says her husband particularly loves the company’s quilts). And, as a new mom, there’s nothing better than a quality time-saver. “If you don’t have time to decorate, just fill your home with flowers. That’s the best thing I’ve come up with,” she shares. “We recently threw a birthday party for my mother-in-law, maybe a month after my son was born, so I didn’t have time to put together a ton of stuff. A friend of mine’s a florist, and I just filled the house with flowers—it felt decorated.”
