Brands in The Time of Babies

It’s the perfect storm: a consumer is searching for new products sold by brands they’ve never purchased from before and are desperate for solutions. They’re willing to pay more for trustworthy, safe quality. That’s right—they’re new parents. It’s that magical customer-acquisition time that Target famously capitalized on by assigning shoppers “pregnancy prediction scores” based on recent purchase patterns. 

With six (!!) new Sterlingites born in the past 14 months, we’re intimately familiar with the world of baby branding. Whether you’re a “quirky niche brand” kind of person or an “organic, compostable, all-natural” kind of person, there are products for you. And that’s really who these brands are talking to—YOU. Turns out that people are still the same people they were before having kids. They’ll spend more on brands that meet their high expectations of quality and safety AND match their values and aesthetic. When it comes to babies, they’re not playing around. After all, there’s a lot at stake: blow outs, skin irritation, sleep deprivation, and the crushing disappointment of feeling like a bad parent when your choices don’t work out.

To build a baby brand, we need to build a brand for the parent while meeting the needs of the baby. When we worked with Aden + Anais, we used co-creation groups to fully tap into consumer insights, resulting in strategy and design work that balanced high-stakes quality and safety needs with uniquely Aden + Anais benefits that reflected both the needs of babies and the lifestyles of their parents. This melding of baby and parent needs has also contributed to the wild success of products like Snoo and Lalo’s The Chair. 

We’re saying “bye bye” to baby brands and products that feel misaligned with our values or aesthetic and going all in on brands that are built for us, not just our babies.