Kyte Baby owner apologizes for firing adoptive NICU mom Marissa Hughes

One TikTok video shows a Kyte Baby outfit printed with animals being thrown out the front door of a house, into a yard full of snow, to the background score of ’N Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye.”

Another shows a new mom cradling two prematurely born babies, with a message on-screen: “One reason why I’ll never purchase from Kyte Baby again.”

The popular Texas-based company, which makes infant clothing from bamboo it touts as cooling and breathable, is under fire from customers after denying an employee’s request to work remotely while tending to her newly adopted, prematurely born baby. Company founder Ying Liu has twice apologized for what she called a “terrible mistake.”

But the outrage and threats of boycott continue.

While Kyte Baby’s actions appear to have been legal, its handling of the employee’s request seems to have hit a nerve with its customer base of parents — including some with preemies of their own. The company also portrays itself as family friendly, with its website declaring, “We’re parents too.”

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The controversy began when the story of Marissa Hughes, a photo studio employee at Kyte Baby, spread online. According to a GoFundMe page started to support the costs of adoption, Hughes, 26, had a difficult journey to becoming a mother, including at least three miscarriages.

She and her husband ultimately decided to pursue adoption. A few days after Christmas, the couple received a call from an adoption agency about a baby born at 22 weeks in El Paso, about nine hours from their home near Dallas-Fort Worth.

“After extensive prayer and a lot of phone calls, we said yes to being his parents! We are so thrilled to have a son!” Hughes, who could not immediately be reached for comment, wrote on the GoFundMe page.

The baby, born weighing 1 pound, was required to stay in the neonatal intensive care unit, with a discharge date expected around March, the fundraiser page said. The couple said they were nervous about the baby’s “various health concerns” and meeting their financial needs.

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Hughes, a seven-month employee of Kyte Baby, asked to work remotely to stay close to her baby at the NICU, according to accounts from Hughes’s sister and Liu, the company founder. But that request was denied.

Hughes told Today.com that her managers at first agreed to let her work remotely while her son was in the hospital, but as she was looking over the maternity leave paperwork, the company called and fired her.

Kyte Baby said in a statement that under its policies at the time, parents who had worked for the company between six and 12 months receive two weeks’ maternity time and must sign a contract saying they will return to their job for six months after the paid leave ends. Employees of more than a year receive four weeks’ paid maternity time and must sign the same contract.

While nine states and the District of Columbia mandate some degree of paid parental leave, federal law guarantees new parents just six weeks of unpaid time off, and not all workers qualify, as previously reported by The Washington Post.

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The federal Family and Medical Leave Act grants 12 weeks of bonding leave to parents, including adoptive or foster parents, after they’ve been with a company for 12 months. Hughes had not worked at Kyte Baby long enough to qualify.

“It was never my intention to quit — I was willing to work from the NICU!” Hughes told Today.com. “I did tell them, ‘This is a slap in the face … My child is fighting for his life.’”

As news of Hughes’s situation began to spread online last week, Liu posted an apology on Kyte Baby’s official TikTok account. She said in the Jan. 18 video she wanted to “apologize to Marissa for how her parental leave was communicated and handled in the midst of her incredible journey of adoption and starting a family.”

Liu added that Kyte Baby is a “family-oriented company” that treats “biological and nonbiological parents equally.” She said that she had been trying to reach Hughes to apologize to her directly.

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Viewers dubbed the video “insincere,” leading Liu to post a second video admitting that the first video was scripted. “I memorized it. I basically just read it, it wasn’t sincere,” she said in her second video on the same day.

Liu described her refusal to grant Hughes’s request for remote work as a “terrible mistake.”

“I was the one that made the decision to veto her request to go remote while she has to stay in the NICU to take care of her adopted baby,” Liu said. “And when I think back, this was a terrible decision — I was insensitive, selfish and was only focused on the fact that her job had always been done on-site and I did not see the possibility of doing it remotely.”

The company said in its statement it would pay Hughes benefits and grant her the remote position that she requested, but she declined the offer.

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As a result of her experience, Kyte Baby is now revising its maternity leave policy, “to give new parents, both biological and nonbiological, more time off and creating a better process to support our employees,” the company said in its statement.

“Kyte Baby needs to stand by their values of being a woman owned, family company,” the statement adds.

Hughes said in a video posted on social media that she’s “encouraged to hear that there will be some changes made for current and future employees of the company.”

“No company is perfect, but … I don’t think that’s a healthy work environment for me,” she told Today.com.

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