Photos by Michael Jurick; Styled by Cricket Burns
I first meet Carley Roney at her office on a mild autumn
afternoon just before the holidays kick into gear. In the high-ceilinged Soho
loft where her company XO Group Inc. is currently headquartered I can feel the sparks
of creative development hatching with each passing second. There’s electricity
in the air. I half-expect to hear bottles of champagne popping as I make my way
through the bustling, open workspace. Amidst three-tiered model wedding cakes,
pastel paper flowers and coffee klatches that burst with new ideas, stands
Carley. It’s past three o’clock in
the afternoon, she hasn’t had a chance to eat her lunch, but she’s
mid-conversation, full of energy and quick with a smile. We dive right in.
Carley went to NYU film school and graduated just as the
Internet began to take shape. It was in college that she met her future husband
and business partner, David Liu, with whom she decided that a new media
enterprise would be her calling. Three short years after getting hitched, David
and Carley gave birth to TheKnot.com in 1996—a wedding website for traditional,
offbeat and everything-in-between-brides. In an industry they originally
considered “tacky and too froufrou,” David and Carley were slowly and
methodically building their base, generating much-needed content, ideas and
inspiration and making connections. The following year, just as they were
receiving financing for their new company, daughter Havana
arrived, now 14. Things only picked up from there.
The next decade of Carley and David’s life together would
bring two more children—Cairo now seven-years-old and Dublin now three—along
with a pair of new businesses, The Nest for budding home buyers and The Bump
for new parents.
“They’re amazing times to be part of someone’s life,” Carley
gushes.
We talk and talk, about everything from choosing a wedding
photographer and starting your own business to mucous plugs and spending an
afternoon playing Legos with the kids. Carley is relaxed but poised, funny but
thoughtful. She’s yet to touch her lunch—focused and attentive. She’s lightning
fast with a joke.
The next time I see Carley she’s at home in Brooklyn
with her family of five. If she was comfortable in her office, she’s downright
tranquil in her apartment. With kids running around getting dressed for the
shoot, Carley patiently sits for hair and makeup while gently encouraging her
youngest son to try on his monkey pajamas to show off for the group.
We open a bottle of champagne and enjoy some light mimosas
as the morning unwinds. Carley toasts the photo shoot and the crew of eight who
have invaded her home before smiling for the camera. 
How did you first
become interested in the wedding industry?
To be perfectly frank, I was not the girl who dreamed of her
wedding from day one. I threw my wedding in under six weeks. David had to plan
most of it! We were like downtown New York City
kids. “We’ll just throw a party! What’s the big deal?” I certainly gained a lot
of respect for the industry after going through it but more so gained a
knowledge of how completely confusing and backwards it was. Everything from
[vendors] not letting David make decisions about the flowers because the
“wife-to-be” wasn’t there. Or, the fact that there was no way you could access
the information when you get home at 8 o’clock
at night when everything is closed. I was like, “How do people plan weddings?
Do you have to quit your job to do it?”… Eventually, when we saw the Internet
we thought to ourselves: “Wow. This would completely change that wedding thing,
wouldn’t it?”
And how did The Knot eventually lead to The
Nest and The Bump?
You
have to listen to your audience and what they want. On The Knot, once we had a
following, there was an explosion of the community on our message board and
visitors to our site… What happened was that after their wedding, people
wouldn’t leave. So they kept coming back…but they talked off-topic. They’d
suddenly be talking about test-driving cars and having babies and the people on
the wedding space would be like, “I don’t care about that! Right now I want to
talk about tulips or freesia!”… So we would get these requests…and then we spun
it off into its own site, The Nest. And the same thing happened with baby… I
always wanted to launch the baby side. I think that is a moment in time when
you need a ton of advice, you really want a community of people to talk to.
What do you find most
challenging about your work?
On a daily basis, the biggest challenge of our life here is
just picking priorities. There are a million exciting things to do [at] any
minute. But to be a good business, you only have so many people and the math
has to work out. When you’re in an organization full of creative people who are
always getting struck by lightning bolts…to be able to have that balance
between doing the maintenance of our business and picking what new things to
invest in is very hard.
And how would you
describe your relationship with David?
Our relationship is very yin-yang. There is a huge amount
of similarities in terms of interests and things like that. But there’s also
the “opposites attract” concept. You know, I would like to go out and David
would like to stay in… At work, David is all vision and I’m all execution. So
it really works incredibly well, but we’re also both incredibly bull-headed… He
calls me the Energizer Bunny.
So do you have any tricks for balancing
home and work life?
I’ve
just been dying for someone to find a way for there to be one more day in the
week. Because that would really help me a lot! My secret to survival is that
when I’m home, I’m home. If I’m home and my kids are awake, I’m 100% there. I
completely shut off everything else. But when they go to bed, the “work me”
turns on again.
Any funny stories about resolving
differences or agreeing on priorities?
We
have very similar parenting philosophies. One thing that the both of us agree
with is that there is no such thing as spoiling your children with time or
attention… It’s been a little more challenging since our daughter became a
teenager. I was willing to be a little bit more lax than he was. That’s the first
area where some conflict came into play. But I think that’s just Dad-like,
because you’re afraid for her safety.
With David being Chinese, have you merged cultures
and traditions in any interesting ways?
We
always have a big dinner party around Chinese New Year… We eat a lot of Chinese
food because David’s mother cooks for us a lot. And we travel to China.
We take the kids to Asia—I think they’ve gone every
other year. It’s great now because we’re starting the business in China
so we have a reason to go a lot. It’s a huge shared passion that David and I
have. We love to travel.
What are the holidays
like at home? Does your family have any holiday traditions?
We
have a Chinese-American Thanksgiving so we have dumplings and turkey! We invite
all of our friends who have nowhere to go or people from the office who are
international. We just love to have a really big Thanksgiving. And then
Christmas, half the time we are out of town. We go to China
every couple of years for Christmas. But I’m the holiday girl in the household
for sure. We always go to Rhode Island,
where I’m from, and pick out a Christmas tree. My whole strategy with it is,
you can’t in any way want it to be perfect.
It’s the activity, not the outcome. So all of my Christmas ornaments are at the
reaching-level of the children, mostly at the bottom of the tree. And then
there are three random ornaments higher up that I’ve hung.
What was your own childhood
like? Are you recreating that for your children or are you doing things
differently?
My parents got divorced when I was six, so everything was
always very complicated. But my parents had a completely amicable divorce so
they all came together on the holidays. I am trying to recreate for my kids a
sense of ritual. Whether it was my dad always making pancakes in the
mornings…the things that you remember.
Finish either
sentence: “I am the kind of mother who always…” or “I am the kind of mother who
never…”
I’m the kind of mother who never makes my kid go back to
their room. If my kids come into my room they can climb right into my bed. I
don’t care if it’s an hour after they went to bed or 4 o’clock in the morning.
In your opinion, what
are some of the most misunderstood aspects about pregnancy and parenthood?
I think that everyone sees these things as a science and
they’re much more of an art. I’m in the advice business and I recommend reading
all of the experts, but at the end of the day, it’s kind of about how you feel
about things. You have to trust your own instincts. Regarding pregnancy, I think
that we are hyper-educated, which is good, but I think that we really don’t
trust our bodies. And I think that is sort of a dangerous place to be at this
point in time… I mean, people have been having babies under trees since
forever!… People also aren’t prepared for the emotional transition. For some
people it is completely peaches and roses. And then for some people, it’s the
hardest transition in their life to suddenly sit home for six weeks with a
worm.
What is the best and
worst piece of parenting advice you’ve ever received?
Never feel guilty because it doesn’t do anybody any good.
And, occasionally, randomly, out of the blue, play hooky. And tell your kids,
“You’re not going to school today and I’m not going to work today.” And show
them that they are what really comes first.
To take us back to
your day job, what are you currently working on? You’re expanding into China so how does that play into the future of your
brands?
There’s still so much to do. Everything is changing and
there’s new technology. We have a lot of mobile applications that are building
communities, so you can talk to other pregnant moms in your birth month all
around the country, on your mobile phone… So for us there are just so many ways
to touch people. On the wedding front, and even on the baby front too, we’re starting
to look at executive producing TV…identifying talent or storylines. With this
international expansion, China is the biggest wedding and baby market in the
world. People are very interested in American advice, particularly on these
topics.
You love to travel
and you’re starting to spend more time abroad, but do you consider yourself a
lifelong New Yorker?
I do. I graduated high school early in order to come here. I
will never leave this place.
~~~Carley’s Five
Favorite Things To Do In NYC With Family~~~
Go To Governors Island. We love taking the free ferry over
to Governors
Island to
ride bikes and enjoy a nice picnic. Definitely a must-do summer activity!
Play In The
Park. We play soccer in CadmanPlazaPark in Brooklyn and hang out for hours in EmpireFultonPark under the BrooklynBridge. We also love riding on Jane’s
Carousel in DUMBO—the horses on this carousel are exquisite!
Ice Skate.
Ice skating at Wollman Rink in Central Park is an activity we all look forward to each winter.
Watch A
Performance At The New Victory Theater. I am an avid New Victory fan. We see
almost every show each season. I love to take the kids to dances and
performances from all over the world—they have a blast!
Explore ArtGalleries. There are tons of galleries in
DUMBO that we love to hop, and the DUMBO Arts Festival is filled with music,
performances and art that blow the kids’ minds each time we go.
