Founder Spotlight: How Muriel Thompson Transformed Frustration into Innovation with MURJER™

Have you ever looked in the mirror and wondered who the stranger staring back at you is?

Whether through motherhood, aging, or simply navigating the different seasons of womanhood, many of us know what it feels like to look at our bodies and wonder when they changed and why we suddenly feel so disconnected from them.

Muriel Thompson knows that feeling intimately. After becoming a mother, Thompson found herself standing in front of a closet filled with clothes that no longer seemed to understand her body. Weeks after giving birth, she was still wearing maternity clothes, frustrated by a postpartum belly she hadn’t expected and anxious to get back into the jeans she once wore with ease.

Like many women, she initially assumed she needed to change. “I remember being in the hospital, staring in a mirror that was way too honest after having my first child,” Thompson recalls. “I was sick of staring at a closet full of clothes that didn’t seem to know what to do with my new, postpartum body.” She tried shapewear, hoping it would provide the support she was looking for. Instead of finding support, she found disappointment. Shapewear rolled, dug into her skin, and failed to live up to its promises.

Then came the realization that would eventually become the foundation of MURJER™: “If these ‘supportive’ clothes can’t even do what they say, then my body isn’t the problem, the clothing is.”

What If Our Bodies Were Never the Problem?

There is enormous pressure placed on women to return to some previous version of ourselves. Lose the baby weight. Get your body back. Shrink the waist. Fight aging. Look younger. Be smaller. But why are we so determined to return to who we were instead of learning to embrace who we have become?

For Thompson, motherhood eventually gave her a different perspective on the body she had spent so much time wishing would change.

“Sure, it would be nice to have my 25-year-old body back,” she says. “But there was no version of that where my hips, which had carried and birthed three children, were going back to exactly where they started. And honestly, I wouldn’t ask them to. Those hips had done something extraordinary.”

This awakening became about far more than accepting a new clothing size. It marked the moment she stopped wishing for her old body to return and started asking why fashion wasn’t designed for the woman she had become.

It is a question worth asking.

A 2025 Forbes article reported that 67% of American women are plus size, yet the cultural image of the “ideal” body remains remarkably narrow.

Women are surrounded by messages about weight-loss medications, diets, fitness programs, anti-aging products, and countless other ways to alter ourselves. Too often, those messages leave little room for genetics, access to nutritious food and health resources, pregnancy, hormones, aging, or simply the reality that healthy and beautiful bodies do not all look the same.

At some point, beauty stopped being only in the eye of the beholder and became increasingly shaped by the marketing powerhouses telling women what we are supposed to look like.

Thompson decided to challenge that narrative.

Turning Frustration into Innovation

With more than 20 years of experience in fashion, Thompson knew the industry. What she didn’t see was enough clothing designed around the bodies women were actually living in, so she created it.

MURJER™ is a premium women’s denim brand designed around the realities of women’s changing bodies, including postpartum changes, bloating, PMS, perimenopause, and aging. Assembled in Los Angeles, the collection incorporates patent-pending support technology directly into its pants, including waist smoothing, tummy support, and Better Butt™ lifting technology without requiring separate shapewear but the technology is only part of Thompson’s story.

The deeper idea behind MURJER™ came from acceptance: women shouldn’t have to punish their bodies in order to participate in fashion. For Thompson, the very changes she once struggled with eventually became the reason the company existed.

“I do not look at the struggle with my body changing from aging or motherhood as a loss,” she says. “This was my ‘why’ for the brand. If I hadn’t had my children or the effects of the hormones from pregnancies and aging, I wouldn’t have had the idea for this brand.”

Sometimes the thing we spend years criticizing about ourselves is the very experience that leads us somewhere new.

Motherhood Prepared Her to Become a Founder

Building the product was only the beginning, Thompson understood fashion and retail, but building a direct-to-consumer company required an entirely different education.

“I knew how to get brands into major retailers, but direct-to-consumer (DTC) has felt like the Wild West,” she says.

Suddenly she wasn’t only a fashion executive. She was learning websites, SEO, paid advertising, photography, content creation, marketing, and how to put her own face on camera and ask strangers to trust what she was building. There were eight-hour editing sessions that had to be started again because a video was created in the wrong format. Campaigns had to be reshot when customers didn’t understand the message. More than 40 fit samples were created in the pursuit of getting the jeans right and she was doing all of it while raising three children.

Interestingly, Thompson says it wasn’t believing she belonged in the founder’s seat that challenged her most. It was figuring out how to build the thing.

“Despite the do-overs and deadlines, none of that ever made me question whether I belonged here,” she says. “It just meant I had more to learn than I expected and that no matter how hard the logistics were, I had to keep showing up.”

Perhaps motherhood had already taught her the lesson entrepreneurship would require. You rarely have all the answers. You figure things out as you go.

A Different Definition of Confidence

Before motherhood and entrepreneurship, Thompson measured success through achievements: opening accounts, closing deals, creating sell-out styles.

Motherhood changed the scoreboard.

“Some days success is getting everyone out of the house on time, or all of the laundry washed, folded, and put away,” she says. “Most days, it is admitting I have no idea what I am doing and doing it anyway.”

The philosophy followed her into entrepreneurship.

“I used to think confidence meant having it all figured out and knowing the outcome before I started. Now I know it means starting anyway.”

There is something liberating about that definition. Confidence isn’t having all the answers before we take the first step. Sometimes confidence is taking the step without knowing whether it’s going to work. And self-love isn’t waiting until the scale, the mirror, or the tag inside our jeans gives us permission to feel worthy, it is acceptance. Your definition of beauty belongs to you, at whatever size and in whatever season of life you find yourself. Perhaps that is the bigger story behind what Thompson has built. MURJER™ may have started with a woman frustrated by the clothes in her closet, but the solution wasn’t about returning her to the woman she used to be. It was about making room for the woman she had become.

When asked what she would tell another woman standing in front of the mirror struggling with her reflection, Thompson’s answer had nothing to do with denim:

“That she is someone she should be proud of. We need to stop measuring ourselves and our bodies against a woman whose day we haven’t lived. We don’t know what that woman survived to look the way she looks, and likewise she doesn’t know what we’ve carried either.” Most importantly, “Be as kind to yourself as you’d be to a friend who told you what you’ve been through.”

Learn More about MURJER™

Discover denim designed to support the body you have now? Explore the collection of denim and pants with built-in support technology at http://www.murjer.com and follow @mur.jer on Instagram and Facebook for styling inspiration and new arrivals.

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