Peta Murgatroyd Shares How She Stays 'Present' and 'Enjoys' Time With Her 3 Kids While Growing Her Brand Peta Jane Beauty

Peta Murgatroyd is trying to do it all as she raises her three kids — Shai Aleksander (born in January 2017), Rio John (born in June 2023), and Milan (born in July 2024).

"I can't see many similarities between them. They all look different. They sound different. Their personalities are completely different. They need different things," the Dancing With the Stars pro, 39, who is married to Maksim Chmerkovskiy, exclusively tells OK! while talking about her successful brand, Peta Jane Beauty. "Milan has this blonde afro. Like, where did that come from? A white-blonde afro. It's crazy, but they're all beautiful, and I love them for completely different reasons. I'm so happy I got my three boys."

The blonde babe, who has been open about her struggles to get pregnant, admits her oldest son had trouble adjusting to having two siblings around.

"He didn't really tell me how much it affected him until later, but he definitely felt the separation of my time. All of a sudden, my attention was divided between two kids, and then three. So now I make a conscious effort to spend one-on-one time with him. The babies are much more needy. They want to be held all the time. They need me constantly. So I try to take Shai out by himself and do things that are just for him," she shares.

"I was pregnant with Milan while doing Dancing With the Stars. I remember walking up to Sasha Farber and saying, 'You'll never guess what happened.' And he was complaining about something in his day. I said, 'No, my day is worse. I'm pregnant again.' He was one of the first people I told. I think I was only eight weeks pregnant and maybe five months postpartum. It was wild," she continues.

Despite her crazy schedule, the businesswoman "tries" to leave the house with her husband so they can get some alone time.

"Last night I was trying to talk to him in the kitchen about something happening next month, and all three kids rushed in. It immediately turned into: 'Mommy, mommy, mommy. Look at this! Come here!' And you're trying to have a serious conversation and it's impossible. Eventually we had to stop and come back to it later that night after everyone was asleep," she says.

"Whenever people hear my kids' ages, they immediately say, 'You're in the thick of it.' And honestly, they're right. I can confidently say I am in the thick of it. But these are also the years you're going to miss one day, so I'm trying to stay present and enjoy it," she adds.

Fortunately for Murgatroyd, she has been able to work from home ever since she started Peta Jane Beauty in 2014.

"I think 2020 was really the turning point. That was when I thought, 'Okay, I need to spend more time on this. I need to put more money into this business.' Before that, it was probably 97 percent dance and only a tiny percentage beauty. I was focused on dancing jobs, theater jobs and things like that. But in 2020, I realized this was a legitimate business and that it was time to really go for it," she notes.

From there, the business has taken off, especially as people gravitate toward some her bestsellers, including Self-Tanning Mousse ($38), Gradual Face Tan ($24) and Self Tanning Face & Body Mist ($42).

"It's been so eye-opening. I've had so many proud moments along the way because, in the last three years, we've grown exponentially. We're doubling our revenue every single year. We're on our way into big retail stores. It's honestly a dream come true. I feel like I had this vision, but I just didn't know how to execute it fully by myself from the very beginning. I needed to put a killer team together to bring this vision to life. I had the formulations. I had what the bottles were meant to look like and the designs going and everything, but I needed marketing. I needed PR. I needed help getting the word out — influencers and everything else," she shares.

She adds, "I truly believe that if you have a good product, you can make anything happen. If you have something that does what it says it's going to do on the bottle, and your promises are kept, and you can stand behind that product knowing it was made with good intention and does exactly what it's meant to do, you're going to have success behind it. Putting together the team was essential. Obviously, putting my name on a bottle is a really big deal. I guess at first I was like, 'Oh yeah, call it Peta Jane,' but then I had to stand back for a second and think, 'I need to make sure this brand is a standalone brand that lives up to the hype.' I have to feel so proud of this to be able to put it out into the market. It has to do exactly what it says it's meant to do."

Ultimately, the mom-of-three is "grateful" to learn all about the business of building a brand.

"It's not just slapping your name on something. It's: How is it going to work? How are you going to get it out to people? How are you going to get it into retail stores? So yeah, it's been a lot, but it's been amazing," she says.

The TV star started the brand to "get rid of orange tans."

"I wanted to get rid of the scaly, flaky skin that makes you look like a crocodile after a week. I wanted to get rid of the bad smell. I wanted to get rid of the long drying time," she explains. "Those were the four things I essentially wanted to abolish. I didn't want people to go through what I'd gone through with twenty years of tanning. Once you have something you want to fix and make better and more accessible and more convenient for people, and you're able to accomplish that, then you have something really good on your hands."

The beauty space might be oversaturated, but she knew she could stand out.

"It comes back to those four things. Other products on the market might have one of those things nailed down, but I really needed to nail down all of them to be able to say this is the best product on the market. You won't be orange. It dries in seconds. You won't get scaly. It comes off evenly. It actually smells good. I wanted to make sure all of those things were five-star, and it took eight years. It took a very long time to get the correct formulation. People message me every single day. I have hundreds of DMs saying, 'Oh my God, I've never smelled a self-tanner like this,' or 'My husband actually says I smell good now instead of bad.' That makes my heart so happy because I'm like, 'Yes, we did it,'" she shares.

Murgatroyd isn't stopping anytime soon.

"We're definitely going international," she declares. "We'll be getting into some very big retailers — ones people definitely know. We have a lot of product expansion coming. We're moving further into body care as well. I can't tell you exactly what's coming yet, but we have new products launching within the next month or two. Then we have additional launches planned for September and October. So we have a full lineup of new products coming, and it's really exciting."

"I'm very proud. I knew from the beginning that I couldn't and didn't want to rely solely on being a professional dancer. My body isn't going to hold up forever. I can't do a million shows a year forever. I needed a side business. I needed something that would generate mailbox money. When I decided to fix this problem in the tanning industry, it became my gateway into business. It became something I could work on while dancing, and it gave me stability. What happens if I break my leg? What happens if my dancing career ends suddenly? I needed something more stable. Now I have a family with three kids, but even before that, I knew I wanted something sustainable. I'm proud because this didn't start three years ago. The growth exploded in the last three years, but this really started in 2015. I had retailers cut out on my vision board. I had a picture of a $200,000 check on there because I wanted to make $200,000 in a year. The other day, I pulled that vision board out of the garage. I looked at it and realized so many things on it had come true. The family of five. The destinations I wanted to visit. The retailers. I sent a picture to my team and said, 'Look at this. Can you believe I put a $200,000 check on here?' We've blown that out of the water now. It was a moment of pure pride," she concluded.