She Got Laid Off Before Her 30th Birthday. Then She Built Btwnthesheets.
A conversation with Ana Escalante Morejon, founder of Btwnthesheets, a genderless wellness brand and curated retailer redefining what it means to take care of yourself with intention.
There is a version of the founder story that gets told constantly, the epiphany moment, the pivot, the overnight growth. And then there is the version Ana tells. The one where you are standing in the middle of your own life, two months away from your 30th birthday, freshly laid off during a pandemic, and wondering whether this is the moment that breaks you or builds you.
For Ana, it built her.
Btwnthesheets began in 2020 as a quiet creative experiment while Ana was still working as a buyer for a beauty subscription company. She was meeting small brand founders every day, hearing their stories, falling in love with the products that didn’t have the visibility they deserved. When the layoff came in 2021, she did not pivot to panic. After a few days of shock, she woke up and decided she was done waiting for the version of herself that would be ready.
In this episode of At Home With Founders, I sit down with Ana for a conversation that covers the full arc: the origin story, the fear, the money, the creative dry spells, the hard contractor conversations, and the version of Btwnthesheets she is building toward. It is an honest one and it is exactly the kind of conversation this podcast was made for.
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Ana Escalante Morejon is the Miami-based founder of Btwnthesheets, a genderless wellness brand and curated retailer that champions independent brands and the founders behind them. With nearly a decade of experience as a corporate buyer in the beauty, wellness, and lifestyle space, Ana spent years discovering extraordinary small brands that weren’t getting the attention they deserved. When a layoff arrived just before her 30th birthday, she stopped waiting for the right moment and built the online store she had always wanted to open.
Btwnthesheets is not about trends or influence. It is about curation with intention – connecting customers to products that genuinely belong in their lives, through the lens of ritual rather than routine. Ana is currently expanding the brand internationally, developing seasonal assortments, and building the community-driven pop-up presence she has always envisioned for Miami.
She is a founder in the truest sense: self-funded, clear-eyed about the hard parts, and deeply committed to building something that does something different.
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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU WILL LEARN
- 02:31 — The Origin Story: How Btwnthesheets started as an Instagram account in 2020 and what Ana was trying to solve for small brand founders who weren’t getting the visibility they deserved
- 04:22 — The Layoff: A timeline of events: the job, the COVID context, the calendar invite with HR, the moment she knew
- 06:44 — The Overwhelm of Starting: Why the hardest part wasn’t the vision – it was figuring out where to even begin, and how Ana started with an LLC and built everything else from what she knew and loved
- 10:53 — The Emotional Reality of Being Let Go: What Ana felt in those first days, the self-questioning, the “why me,” and the unexpected disappointment of corporate silence from people she trusted
- 21:37 — The Scariest Decision: Why telling people she was starting a business was harder than filing the paperwork and what happened when she finally said it out loud
- 23:44 — The Beauty of Building Quietly: Ana’s case for keeping your head down in the early stages, and why she didn’t announce Between the Sheets until she was ready
- 24:19 — Seriously Considering Stopping: The honest answer: quiet sales periods, a dwindling startup fund, and how Ana manages the fear without making decisions from it
- 28:03 — Bootstrapping, Risk, and the Safety Net She Gave Herself: Why having options, not certainty, is how Ana stays in the game
- 31:00 — Creative Burnout as a Solo Founder: How Ana recognizes when she’s running on empty and the 24–48 hour reset that brings her back
- 33:09 — Filling Back Up: Pinterest boards, fashion magazines, reviewing brand decks from her trip to Copenhagen, and watching what competitors are talking about
- 37:57 — Letting Go to Step Up: The perfectionism Ana had to release, the student mindset she had to reclaim, and becoming okay with the early work being rough
- 41:02 — Founding a Business as Self-Knowledge: Why entrepreneurship is, in Ana’s words, a lot of therapy and what she has come to see about herself that working for someone else kept hidden
- 42:22 — The Contractor Situation: A real-world lesson in boundaries – what happened with a contractor who couldn’t deliver, and how Ana finally had the conversation she had been putting off
- 44:15 — Where Between the Sheets Is Going: International curation, Danish brands, seasonal assortments, community-driven Miami pop-ups, and the shift from product launches to intentional storytelling
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