How these female founders found room in their budgets for childcare

Childcare is an increasingly sought-after employee benefit, but offering a stipend that makes a serious dent in the average worker’s daycare bills is no easy feat.

At least two companies have figured out how to do it, though. Neither are enterprise organizations with enormous benefits budgets. And both happen to be run by women with children of their own.

A wake-up call. “The cost of childcare, I think, I was very unprepared for when I became a mom,” Taylor Capuano, co-founder of CAKES body, an adhesive bra brand, told HR Brew last year. She and her sister, Casey Sarai, started CAKES as a side hustle during the pandemic. Capuano was a new mom at the time, and estimated she was probably taking home $200 after taxes when factoring in the $3,000 a month she paid for childcare.

In 2025, CAKES rolled out an unusually generous childcare benefit, pledging to reimburse up to $3,000 a month for eligible employees’ care expenses. That goes far beyond the most common benefits US employers provide their workers for caregiving expenses, which is a pre-tax flexible savings account capped at $7,500 annually. The annual cost of childcare in the US was over $13,000 as of 2024, according to non-profit organization Child Care Aware of America.

When the advocacy organization Moms First initially began talking to executives about childcare benefits several years ago, it was difficult to make the case for it to business leaders, COO Molly Day said at an April 20 event hosted by CAKES.

“The thing we heard time and time again from CEOs was childcare just costs too much,” she said. But, “I think, as mothers, we knew intuitively this is not a cost center for a business.”

While CAKES’s childcare benefit might be more generous than most, Sarai said she and her sister simply see it as good business. “We…spend so much time and money investing into hiring and onboarding, so it’s really a way that we’re investing into keeping the talent that we have,” she told HR Brew recently. Since rolling out the benefit, six members of the company’s 30-person workforce have taken advantage of it, she said. CAKES has also had zero voluntary turnover over the last year, she added.

Molly Moon’s, an ice cream chain based in Seattle, took employees’ career development into account when designing its childcare benefit. “We really noticed that we had some incredibly talented parents working in the company, at the scooper and shift leader level,” founder and CEO Molly Moon Neitzel recalled. She wondered, “Why aren’t these people shift leaders, assistant managers, managers?”

At the time, Neitzel had a child in preschool, making her “intimately familiar” with the cost of childcare. Her gut feeling was that these employees “[couldn’t] afford the childcare” necessary for a more time-intensive role.

To address this issue, Molly Moon’s started reimbursing care costs of up to $1,000 per month, per child for eligible workers in 2023. It also provides up to $4,200 annually for workers’ aftercare and summer camp costs, for children aged five to 12.

Making it work. Both Neitzel and the CAKES co-founders said they had to be strategic when budgeting for these benefits. Capuano said she and her sister choose not to “over-invest” in other areas of the company, such as top-of-funnel marketing.

The first year that Molly Moon’s offered childcare benefits, it cost them $32,000, according to Denise Brown, chief finance and operating officer. That amounts to just 0.2% of annual sales— and while the company still cares about “every little decimal,” they’re also seeing the returns they’d hoped for from the benefit, Neitzel said.

Molly Moon’s has avoided more than 30 days of potential absences because employees had the right childcare, “which is huge not just for the financial savings, but for team morale and operational consistency,” Neitzel said. At least four Molly Moon’s employees have grown their families specifically because the childcare benefit exists, she said, and several people have told the company it was a motivating factor when they applied to work there.

Childcare has also been a powerful recruiting lever for CAKES Body, the co-founders said. Hundreds of people have reached out about working for the company since the benefit was launched, Sarai said. “We’ve been able to attract C-suite level talent from Fortune 500 companies that probably wouldn’t have made a shift to more of the startup environment before,” she added.

Running the numbers. In an era when corporate executives are laser-focused on cost containment, pitching a childcare benefit that makes a major difference in workers’ budgets may be daunting.

CHROs and other business leaders are uniquely attuned to how childcare can affect areas such as turnover and presenteeism, Ramya Parthasarathy, a McKinsey partner who recently collaborated with Moms First on research about this topic, said. Making the link between the two may help make the difference when speaking with executive leaders about investing in caregiving, she suggested. “Folks who can actually tie that attrition statistic or tie that retention statistic to childcare and childcare benefits, those are the ones that often move the needle quickly.”