Midlife is magical.
The Ladyculture name
Lady. Historically, a "lady" was a set of rules: well-behaved, well-managed, pleasing to the existing order. We’re taking it back, keeping the elegance and ambition, throwing out the rest. Here, ‘lady’ means something you define for yourself. What success looks like. What beauty looks like. What a life well-lived looks like. No one else gets to hand you that definition.
Culture. A culture is what happens when people who share values actually find each other and co-create meaning. Ours is built around wholeness, community, and the refusal to shrink. Around fun, yes, and also around courage, care, and the willingness to be in real conversation about what this stage of life actually is.
Together: Ladyculture. Just like ‘subculture’ or ‘monoculture’, it’s a word in its own right. A culture built by and for people who are done letting someone else define what it means to be a woman in the middle of her life.
How Ladyculture happened.
For years, we have both been coaching separately. Shannon guides entrepreneurs and executives to articulate who they are and build brands from a deeper sense of self. Roya coaches high-performing leaders through their hardest professional and personal transitions. We use different methodologies, but often find ourselves serving similar clients: accomplished, capable women who are reckoning with the gap between the life they’ve intentionally built and the one they actually want.
The women we work with are not struggling because they are broken or lost. They struggle because the things they want are often socially de-valued, labeled “midlife crisis material”, or don’t align with what they’ve been told will lead to a satisfied life.
We call bullshit on the whole premise of success on someone else’s terms, and have been building our own lives to feel good, to satisfy, and to inspire. Not that this is easy. It takes honesty with self, reflection, support, and radical prioritization as we look to balance our needs with those of the many people that count on us.
While we are lucky to have each other, we couldn’t find a community where women could get support in their growth AND access expert information on midlife topics AND show up as their full, goofy, beautiful, serious selves. Women need other women, yet no one had built the thing these women actually needed. So we built it!
Meet the founders
Shannon DeJong and Roya Platsis met in 7th grade history class.
They have been busting through their limiting beliefs, building businesses, and wearing outfits that bring them joy ever since.
Lady Bios
Shannon DeJong
Shannon DeJong has spent more than two decades asking one question: who are you, and how do you build something honest from that?
As founder of House of Who, a brand naming agency launched in 2011, she has created hundreds of brand identities for organizations ranging from early-stage startups to Google, Adobe, and HP. Her training is in linguistics & communications from UC Berkeley, which means she has always understood that naming something is the first act of making it real.
After two decades of applying that question to companies, she recognized that the same work she did for brands was precisely what women in midlife needed for themselves: the profound work of designing a new, emerging self.
She brings a lifelong instinct for convening women: HOWL, a women's business mastermind in Berkeley; the BE Conference at SXSW; Da Salon, a literary salon in Sonoma County.
She is a trained actor and performer, writer for the stage and page, and a twenty-year Soto Zen practitioner, all of which ground her coaching and consulting work in deep presence and a capacity for big, existential topics. She explores similar themes in unbranded, her newsletter on brand and identity. She splits her time between Northern California and Southwest France, and is the mother of a toddler, her greatest creative work to date.
Roya Platsis
Roya Platsis is an executive coach, transformation strategist, and psychedelic integration coach who works with high-performing women navigating midlife redesign.
She spent nearly two decades inside organizations as a senior HR executive, doing the work of leadership development, large-scale transformation, and change management. She knows what it actually takes to build something that makes sense. It’s not just the inspiration part, but the systems, the structures, and the follow-through. She brings that same rigor to the deeply personal work of identity and life redesign.
Roya’s coaching practice is equal parts inner work and strategic frameworks. There’s tarot and spreadsheets and enneagram. She is as comfortable building a life architecture with you as she is sitting with you in the hard shit or making an altar to welcome in a new season or reason.
Along with being an entrepreneur and coach, she is a wife, mother to two young adults, is a community builder, and a firm optimistic realist. She has tiny fun tattoos. She is both super intense and very laid back. She will tell you the truth before she tells you what you want to hear. She WILL be swearing. She finds great joy in a room full of women who are diving deep, getting goofy, and going all-in on authenticity.
We didn’t set out to start a company.
We were looking for resources for our clients, to answer the questions that kept coming up in our sessions.
Ladyculture is the result of taking women’s questions and desires seriously.
Come as you are.
Suits, sequins or sweatpants.
All are welcome.
We built Ladyculture because we craved a community where women could show up as their authentic selves.
Turns out, a lot of other people crave it too!