OUR STORY
Born from a question: "Wait… who am I in this?"
IyaJumi is ancestral healing made visible, wearable, and communal. A brand and a movement holding the intersection of cultural identity and the wholeness of BIPOC motherhood.
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · · ANKARA BABY CARRIER COMING SOON
MEET KHALA
Founder of IyaJumi · Mother · Whole Woman
They call me IyaJumi.
Iya means mother in Yoruba. And in Yoruba culture, you are called Iya + your first child's name — so IyaJumi means mother of Jumi, my eldest. I've noticed it's carried over into the Black American community, too. We've all done it, forgotten a mom's name, and just called her so-and-so's mom. It's just what we do.
For a long time, I didn't like it. It felt like it erased me. Like Khala, the person had disappeared and been reduced to just a mom.
But when I sat with its real meaning, something shifted. To be named for your child in Yoruba culture is not an erasure. It is an honor. A term of endearment, respect, and positive affirmation. It says: you are so important to this person's existence that you are named for them.
When I accepted that, I embraced it. And IyaJumi became the name for everything I'm building because it holds exactly what this brand is about. The mother and the woman. Interwoven. Inseparable. Whole.
I'm Khala (KAY-la) Toriola.
Mother of two (soon to be three), Nigerian and African American household, eldest daughter, high achiever, and the woman who somehow never fully lost herself in the role of motherhood, but spent a long time wondering why she couldn't find her people.
I have a Master's in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and a decade of organizational leadership work. I am co-founder and COO of the Eldest Daughters Collective, a strategic organizational consultant and financial advisor for my husband's nonprofit Spora Network, a certified ancestral healing coach, reiki master, and full-spectrum doula. Founder of Rooted in Glow, my K-pop inspired coaching and embodiment practice. An evolving entrepreneur building IyaJumi from the ground up.
And I am doing all of this while growing and raising babies.
And still, every time I walked into a mom space, I left feeling like something was missing.
Not because I needed more support. Because I needed peers. Women who were creative, resourced, ambitious, and rooted. Women who loved their kids and had no intention of making that their whole personality. Women who understood that motherhood is one expression of who you are, not the erasure of everything else.
Therapy helped me understand my patterns. Ancestral healing helped me trace my roots. But it was building something that didn't exist that helped me recognize and reclaim my wholeness.
IyaJumi is that something.
I am a living blend of cultures, lineages, and ways of knowing.
That shapes everything I create. I believe in color over beige, depth over performance, and the radical idea that you can be a deeply present mother and a fully expressed woman at the same time.
I'm here to be a living example of what it looks like to just be yourself fully, unapologetically, in all your dimensions. To give you permission, through my own embodiment, to take up that same space.
Because when you allow yourself to fully inhabit your womanhood, motherhood stops being something you perform and becomes something that flows effortlessly from who you already are. The two are not in competition. They are interwoven: part of the same creative, feminine energy that emerges when you allow it.
That is the life I am building. And IyaJumi is the space I hold for you to build yours.