Gioia
A chair designed for the
modern breastfeeding journey.
what we’re building
Pumping breastmilk shouldn’t feel painful, stressful, and lonely.
We’re building a solution.
The Gioia (joy-ah!) chair supports the forward lean posture pumping requires, while also meeting the full range of feeding positions a new parent moves through.
Made to grow with your family long after your pumping days are behind you.
Distinctly Gioia
Gioia is a multipurpose chair with three distinct attributes:
Forward-leaning for pumping
Back-supporting for nursing and bottle feeding
Portable to meet your breastfeeding needs around your home
Gioia
Embodied.
Exploring the relationship between body and object.
Be part of the gioia community
Let’s Connect
If you see yourself in this, as an investor, a collaborator, or something we haven't thought of yet, email: pumpingproductinfo@gmail.com
Take our Survey
If you’ve pumped breastmilk, we would love to hear about your experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
Not yet, but it's coming! We're aiming to have the chair available for purchase by 2028.
-
Join our email list — it's the best way to hear about updates, early access opportunities, and what we're learning along the way. Sign up here →
-
Gioia works with gravity to support your body in the ideal forward-lean posture that promotes relaxation and milk production. In a Gioia chair, you can rest, read, or even fall asleep while you pump, without holding yourself in place.
The chair has multi-purpose functionality adapting for pumping, nursing and bottle feeding.
-
Any breastfeeding parent who pumps. If you've braced and endured through a pumping session and wished for something better, Gioia is for you.
-
We're based in Burlington, Vermont, and we built the foundation of this product through Generator Makerspace's JumpStart program — a 13-week bootcamp for product-based businesses. Gioia started because we needed a chair that supported our full breastfeeding journey. We’re excited to bring this important product into the world.
-
Gioia is pronounced, “Joy-ah!”
Our Story
Liv Fauver, MD and Sophie Bodnar are longtime friends and collaborators embarking together on a new creative journey: to build a chair that supports parents who pump breastmilk.
Both new parents living in Burlington, Vermont, Liv and Sophie share a passion for innovative design, movement practices and culture building as a creative act.
Together with their partners, babies and dear friends, they enjoy learning to navigate the new terrains of parenting and reimagining what radical support can be.
What we believe
ON BREASTFEEDING
Breastfeeding is a radical act and parents deserve support in pursuing it.
Breastfeeding is labor, service, love, care. It can be lonely, taxing, exhausting, gratifying.
Breastfeeding predates humanity. It is one of the oldest shared experiences yet no two breastfeeding journeys look the same.
ON TIME & SPACE
Breastfeeding happens everywhere; meaningful support must adapt to meet parents’ needs.
Parents deserve comfort in space and time to embrace the act of feeding their baby.
ON SYSTEMS
Lack of breastfeeding support is a health equity issue and never a personal failure.
Conversations about the benefits of breastfeeding are irrelevant without acknowledging and finding real solutions to structural barriers to breastfeeding.
Improving systems that support breastfeeding requires innovation.
ON CREATION AND INTERDISCIPLINARY DESIGN
We believe the most transformative solutions come from the interaction between disciplines. No single discipline has The Answer. There is no one answer.
People deserve access to support and resources to create meaningful solutions to real problems.