Natalie Gordon has built a nearly $300 million business around baby registries, and now she wants to save expecting parents from the ‘devastated panic’ of baby stores.
(Bloomberg) — Babylist has developed a roughly $300 million business by making the lives of soon-to-be parents easier with online gift registries and product recommendations.
Now the brand is expanding into the physical world with an 18,000-square-foot flagship that Chief Executive Officer Natalie Gordon is betting will put it on the path to becoming a major retail presence. The space, slated to open in Beverly Hills, California, this summer, will be focused on letting shoppers test products.
The company, founded by Gordon a dozen years ago, sees a void in the baby gear sector that has been dominated by legacy chains. These retailers have struggled in recent years. Babies “R” Us shuttered late last decade when parent company Toys “R” Us failed. BuyBuy Baby is the biggest remaining US retailer in the category, however it’s owned by Bed, Bath & Beyond, which has been flirting with bankruptcy.
Bloomberg recently spoke with the 42-year-old Gordon, who is a mother of two, about her ambitions for Babylist and why helping overwhelmed parents has been a good formula.
Like a lot of founders in the consumer sector, bad experiences pushed you to start a company. What put you over the edge?
These are legacy brands, and they’re embarrassing. They’re pink and blue with storks, and I am a modern woman.
They’re getting the brand wrong. They’re not speaking to me. They’re literally creating a product for a baby, so our brand right away was much more modern.
Is there a specific memory that still gnaws at you from when you were expecting?
Babies “R” Us existed then. I walked into one, and the feeling was kind of a devastated panic. And I’ve heard this from other people. It’s a visceral moment of complete overwhelm. Do I actually need all this stuff? I don’t know what any of this is.
It’s a real feeling of wanting to turn back around. It was very true for me.
A few years after founding the company, you focused on the baby category instead of tackling other gift-giving events, like weddings. The brand then added content around product reviews and advice. Why take this approach?
Before Babylist existed, if you Googled for best strollers, you would get a 27-slide slideshow. There was not deep research on this, and that’s what we really tackled.
We see our job as helping them make the choice between the best products. We really see ourselves serving every expecting family in the United States.
Why does shopping for baby gear cause such angst and present so much opportunity to provide guidance?
You’ve never done this before. You’re not familiar with any of the brands. You’re not familiar with how you would differentiate between two products.
We really have been trying to solve this digitally for years, and I think doing an exceptional job and building a lot of trust. We’ve done that through video. On our YouTube channel, you watch a video that’s less than five minutes and you understand both the pros and the cons of that product.
Babylist, which has raised roughly $50 million from investors, books revenue by driving purchases through weblinks to retailers such as Amazon. It also has its own online store that helped boost sales about 20% last year to $290 million. What will this physical store be like?
It’s going to be highly experiential. You can go in and you can make these 50 top product decisions by trying out products. You’ll see the products as they’ll be used.
When you walk into a big box retailer, often you’ll see boxes of products stacked and you can’t actually try it out.
How did the woes of retailers in the category influence the decision to push into physical stores?
There’s a big opportunity here.
This flagship will definitely inform a long-term scalable strategy.
Do you think Babylist can become the next Babies “R” Us?
My goal with the company is that it is the generational brand when you’re having a baby. Whether that’s a national retail footprint is TBD.We’re really trying to reinvent what physical retail would look like for this category. What exists, maybe it worked before the internet. But I don’t know that it ever worked.
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