Amreen Iqbal: Building a Business, Raising Four Children and Redefining the Working Mum
For working mothers, the conversation about “balance” can sometimes feel almost impossible to live up to.
There’s always work to be done, children who need you, messages arriving at all hours, meetings, and, somewhere in between, the expectation that everything should somehow feel perfectly managed.
Amreen Iqbal has stopped expecting it to.
The founder of jewellery brand Piece of You is raising four children while growing a business built around something deeply personal: turning memories, relationships and meaningful moments into jewellery people can keep.
And while motherhood and entrepreneurship inevitably pull her in different directions at times, Amreen does not see the two parts of her life as opposites.
“I hope they learn that you do not have to choose one version of yourself,” she says of what she wants her children to take from watching her work. “Being present as a mother and being ambitious in your work are not in conflict, they can actually feed each other.”
✦ Building Something That Means More
When Amreen started Piece of You, she wanted to create more than another jewellery company.
She felt the industry could sometimes be transactional. A beautiful object is made, bought and sold, with its value often tied to its price tag. She wanted her pieces to carry something more personal.
“Every piece we make is meant to hold something, a memory, an emotion, a relationship, rather than just looking beautiful on its own,” she explains.
It also gave her the opportunity to build a company that reflected more of who she was beyond being a business owner.
“I wanted to create a space where I could bring my whole self into the work, not just the business side of me but the mother, the daughter, the person who believes deeply in family and connection.”
That philosophy has gradually found its way into how her children experience the business too.
One of the most personal projects has involved taking their sketches and turning them into real pieces of jewellery.
Rather than simply seeing Mum answering messages, travelling or disappearing into meetings, her children can now see the process behind what she does — and, importantly, see their own creativity become part of it.
“They can point to a piece and say, ‘I drew that,’ and there is a pride in that which I did not anticipate,” says Amreen.
For her, there is another lesson in that experience too: that children’s ideas are worth taking seriously.
“When they see their own ideas taken seriously enough to become something someone else would wear and treasure, I hope it teaches them that their creativity matters, that being young does not mean your ideas are small.”
✦ The Moment It Became More Than a Passion Project
Like many businesses, Piece of You did not begin with a single dramatic moment when everything suddenly fell into place.
But there was one customer request that shifted Amreen’s perspective.
A client came back and asked her to recreate the idea behind an existing piece for her own daughter.
It made Amreen realise that customers were not only buying jewellery they liked. They were attaching meaning to it and imagining it being carried into the next generation.
“That is when it hit me,” she says. “This was not just something beautiful I had made once, it was something people wanted to carry forward.”
It was the point at which she began treating Piece of You less like a passion project and more like a company she intended to build properly, putting greater structure and focus behind its growth.
✦ Forget Perfect Balance
Of course, building that company alongside raising four children comes with a reality that will be familiar to many working parents.
Some days, work takes over. On others, family has to come first.
Amreen says accepting that has been one of the biggest shifts she has made.
“Honestly, ‘balance’ can be a bit of a myth, and I have stopped chasing the idea of it being perfectly even every single day,” she says. “Some days the business needs more of me, some days my children do, and I have had to make peace with the fact that it will rarely be a fifty-fifty split.”
What she has consciously tried to leave behind is the guilt that can accompany both sides of working motherhood: feeling guilty for working when you are with your children, and guilty for thinking about your children when you are working.
Instead, she has started looking for places where the two worlds can genuinely overlap.
The children’s sketch project is one example. Rather than rigidly separating “Mum time” from “work time”, she has looked for opportunities for her children to understand, contribute to and feel connected to what she is creating.
“It does not solve everything, there are still days that feel stretched thin,” she says, “but it has made the balancing feel less like a constant trade-off and more like something we are building together.”
✦ Motherhood Changed the Measure of Success
Amreen says much of her drive came from watching her father build something of his own from the ground up.
Hard work and ambition were simply part of the environment she grew up in.
Motherhood has not made her less ambitious. But it has changed what she considers an achievement.
Where success may once have been largely defined by growth, numbers and business milestones, there is now another measure alongside them.
“Success looks different,” she says. “It is just as much about building something my children can be proud to watch grow, and eventually be part of, as it is about the business metrics themselves.”
That does not mean she has lowered her ambitions for Piece of You. Far from it. She wants the brand to grow and succeed commercially.
But there is a bigger question sitting behind that growth: was the way she built it worth it?
“I still want Piece of You to succeed in every conventional sense,” she says, “but I want it to succeed in a way that my children can look back on and feel was worth the time it took away from them.”
✦ What She Hopes Her Children Remember
Perhaps that is one of the more realistic ways to look at working motherhood.
Our children will see us busy. They will see the calls, the deadlines and the days when work demands more of us than we would like. But they are also watching what we build, how we treat our ambitions and what we do with the ideas that matter to us.
Years from now, Amreen hopes her children remember that they were never standing outside that part of her life looking in.
“I would love for them to say that I built something real, and that I built it with them, not around them,” she says.
She hopes they remember being small enough to sketch something for fun and having a mother who listened closely enough to turn it into something real.
And perhaps that is the lesson at the heart of Piece of You, both as a jewellery brand and as part of Amreen's story as a working mother.
Children do not necessarily need to see a mother who somehow manages everything perfectly. They can also learn from seeing a woman who cares deeply about her family, remains ambitious about her own future and finds a way, imperfectly and intentionally, to make room for both.
As Amreen puts it, she wants her children to grow up knowing that “ambition and family were never presented to them as opposites.”
For many working mums, that may be the version of balance worth aiming for.
