Mission: Impossibly Comfy PJs

How on earth could the career of an undercover CIA officer prove invaluable in launching a line of pajamas? Ask Emily Hikade-mom, spy, entrepreneur

- By Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

A duffel bag full of mementos and retirement gifts commemorating a career in the CIA sat slumped behind a doorway for months, hidden in plain sight. It was November 2022, and Emily Hikade's husband, Chris, had dropped his bag of spy paraphernalia there after retiring from the agency that prior January. Emily had left the CIA in 2018. She and her husband had worked at many of the same far-flung international embassies, in nine countries across three continents, both as American "diplomats," for more than a decade-but they'd never spoken about the reality of their lives to anyone outside the agency.

But now it was time. Not only were they both free to step out of their old identities, but Hikade had also built a new one that needed her full attention: CEO. She'd hatched a plan for a second career as a founder nearly a decade earlier, and now the company she'd started in 2015 as a side hustle-Petite Plume, a pajama brand, of all things-was taking off. Initially, her plan had simply been to sell enough PJs to eventually replace her government salary. But Petite Plume had instead doubled its revenue every year and was on track to bring in more than $10 million in 2022.

The Hikades had tried to sit their children down multiple times to tell them the big family secret, but the timing was never right-it rarely is with four boys between the ages of 6 and 14. Their oldest, Camden, had recently started at his 13th school, this time in suburban Chicago, where they'd relocated in 2018; they didn't want to thrust yet another big change on him, no matter how cool this revelation might eventually seem to a teen. They'd been the kind of parents who didn't shield their kids from tough facts, but there'd always been this colossal omission, just sitting there below the surface.