Women in Retail Leadership Circle (WIRLC) member Melanie O’Neil and her home décor brand Rustic Marlin have raised over $8,000 in a little over one week for maternal mental health after O’Neil was moved to act following a local tragedy involving a mother accused of killing her three children.

O’Neil, who co-founded Rustic Marlin with her husband Brian a little over 10 years ago in Hanover, Mass., said she became “overwhelmed” by the stories of women suffering from postpartum depression and other postpartum mental health challenges after news emerged of a mother in nearby Duxbury allegedly strangling her children and attempting to kill herself last month. A similar tragedy in San Francisco, where a mother is accused of killing her two daughters in December, also engendered O’Neil to take action.

“When [the incident in] Duxbury happened, that’s very local to us,” O’Neil said in an interview Thursday. “That hit home and was definitely devastating.”

O’Neil said she spent an entire weekend learning more about postpartum depression and other maternal mental health disorders. She learned that maternal anxiety and depression can impact up to one in five women, yet those disorders and symptoms are not universally screened for or treated. She learned that up to 20 percent of women experience clinical depression during and/or after pregnancy, and that up to 15 percent of women will develop anxiety during pregnancy or after childbirth.

“It made me think more from a female leader standpoint that these women come back to work, and they’re talking to me about the most private parts of their body, but they would never admit that their brain wasn’t quite normal yet. That’s what hit me — what can I do about that?” She said. “I make so many adaptations for people’s physical ailments, but it’s hard for people in today’s world — they feel such shame — to say ‘I have the baby blues’, and it’s so much more than that.”

In her research, O’Neil discovered The Blue Dot Project, a project of the social change nonprofit 2020 Mom that seeks to raise awareness of maternal mental health disorders. The blue dot has become a national symbol for maternal mental health survivorship, support, and solidarity.

O’Neil decided this would be the perfect organization to partner with to raise awareness, and began designing a line of $25 signs, keychains and decorative blocks centered around the blue dot. All of the profits are donated to The Blue Dot Project.

Since launching the product line Feb. 3, O’Neil said she has been overwhelmed with emotion at “the kindness that has been pouring out.”

A woman who owns a hair salon purchased 100 “Stronger Together” signs to hand out to every woman who comes to the salon; another is gifting the signs to all the female-identifying people on their team. People have volunteered to help create the signs at Rustic Marlin for free. Nurses at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have offered to sell the signs. Others have purchased the signs, written notes in sharpie on the back of them, and dropped them off in friends’ mailboxes.

“[We’ve had] individuals send us notes that say, ‘I called my friend and checked up on her, thank you for being the reminder that I needed,'” O’Neil said. “These unfortunate incidents have shed light on the fact that this is a topic that everybody is sort of sweeping under the rug, and we really need to make change.”

Now, O’Neil is looking for other retailers and brands to work with to create more awareness of maternal mental health.

“I’m here and open to talking to all businesses and being creative in how I can partner up with them to make this even bigger,” she said.

O’Neil can be reached at melanie@rusticmarlin.com. Want to meet other women like O’Neil? Become a member of Women in Retail Leadership Circle today.