Christella
Christella was our founder’s mother. She passed away in 2026.
She was a wonderful mother and an even more devoted grandmother. She is the reason this company carries her name, and she is the standard it measures itself against. May her soul rest in peace.
How it started
The idea itself came from something far more ordinary. Our founder and his wife needed a Nanny, and could not find one — not because there was nobody out there, but because there was no good way to look.
Every parent they knew had a version of the same story. A wonderful Nanny who left for nursing school. Another who moved on after a year for slightly better pay, because nothing in the arrangement gave them a reason to stay. Nannies with children of their own, who needed a kind of flexibility most families could not offer. It is a complicated, deeply personal industry, and the way families actually navigate it is by posting in a Facebook group or asking Reddit and hoping somebody answers.
In 2026, that is not merely difficult. It is absurd. There is technology for everything else.
The platforms that do exist mostly monetise the search rather than the relationship. You pay $39 or more a month, you hire somebody, you leave. The incentive is a revolving door, and everyone can feel it.
We think it should work the other way around. Chrella costs less. Families and Nannies each get a community of their own, and a shared one between them. And it does the thing we believe matters most.
It gives Nannies a professional platform that belongs to them.
Not a listing to be refreshed for the next family. Not a profile whose only job is to sell herself, again, to a stranger. A place where her endorsements, her credentials, her references and her years of work are hers — they stay with her, they follow her, and she decides who sees them. The way every other profession already works.
The name, and the mark
Chrella — pronounced KRELL-ah — is short for Christella.
The logo is a single letter doing several jobs at once. A rose a, with an amber c folded into it: the c for Chrella, and the a for the letter the name comes to rest on.
Look again and the a is a mother’s belly, with the c curled inside it as the child.
And a is for alma mater — Latin for nourishing mother. It is the root of the phrase we use for the place that raised us, and it is the oldest idea in this company: being cared for well is what lets a person go out and do everything else.