With steady sales, a fundraising round underway and a new grant from the NC IDEA Foundation, a women-founded startup in Davidson is expecting growth in 2020 as it prepares to open up more sales channels for its signature safe sleeping boxes for infants.
Pip & Grow’s Smitten baby box is a portable sleeping unit designed to reduce the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (or SIDS). The product first launched in October 2016 and has seen solid traction so far, with over 5,000 boxes sold B2B. Smitten starts at $45 and comes in different printed designs.
The women behind Pip & Grow — co-founders Amber Kroeker and Kate Compton Barr and CMO Sarah Nau — share an expertise in public health, which gives the startup a sense of credibility as the Smitten baby box becomes a player in a relatively untapped subset of the baby product industry.
Kroeker, formerly a child injury prevention expert at the University of Michigan, first envisioned the idea while working at a children’s hospital. Her job involved reviewing infant deaths and come up with preventative measures, one of which was safe sleeping spaces.
Though grant funding allows hospitals to buy safe sleep spaces and packing space for new parents, Kroeker found that in about 90% of infant death cases, families weren’t using them. Rather than moving their baby to a separate nursery or room, parents were leaving their infants in less safe environments such as bouncy chairs, car seats or swings.
On a quest to find more portable safe sleeping products, Kroeker came across the Finnish baby box. Part of Finland’s infant mortality prevention program which started in 1938, all new mothers are given a box that doubles as a crib and includes other items such as clothing, bedding and care items. Kroeker wrote the Finnish government asking to sell her a baby box, but to no avail — the agency could only distribute baby boxes to Finnish residents.
So Kroeker decided to make her own. She received a $25,000 grant from the University of Michigan and consulted pediatricians, nurses and packing experts to gather insight on how to make a better version of the Finnish baby box. Those changes included slanting the sides of the box, relocating the handles, eliminating the lid and adding safety tips on the headboard.
Kroeker shared her prototype with Compton Barr, a behavioral scientist and friend she knew from her previous position at the University of Michigan, who was quick to jump in and help start up the business.
Shortly after Pip & Grow’s launch, the pair met their third executive team member at a trade show: Sarah Nau, a public health expert and writer for WeeSpring, a baby product review site. With a background in social work, Nau was an easy choice as the company’s chief marketing officer.
The three women are now running Pip & Grow from different parts of the U.S., with Kroeker in Portland, Nau in Seattle and Compton Barr in Davidson. But they still maintain that Davidson is their home base. Compton Barr hopes to secure a spot in Davidson College’s Hurt Hub, an increasingly popular coworking and office space for entrepreneurs in the Lake Norman area.
With B2B Sales Base, Pip & Grow Directs Target Toward Hospital Market
Pip & Grow’s B2B sales to-date span a diversity of sectors, including Medicaid service providers, community resource organizations and disaster relief programs. The startup will soon expand to more areas pending the release of baby box safety standards from U.S. regulators, which will allow Pip & Grow to tap into a major market: hospitals.
The release of the Consumer Products Safety Commission standards, expected in 2020, will mean a major turning point in Pip & Grow’s sales pipeline, as Smitten is significantly cheaper than pack and plays, cribs and other infant-oriented items.
Compton Barr says waiting on these standards is “perhaps the biggest stumbling block” Pip & Grow has faced so far.
“Hospitals want to have those standards in place for any product they might bring to their newborn nursery ward,” Compton Barr adds. “It has taken us years and years to get through that process, largely because there’s competitive pushback to having safety standards for baby boxes from other competitors.”
In addition to its hospital appeal, Pip & Grow also has B2B sales potential for OBGYNs, doulas, midwives, lactation consultants, international organizations like UNICEF and WHO, as well as retailers such as Walmart, Target and even small boutiques.
Though the company has experimented with these channels, Compton Barr says the consumer market “needs more credibility-building before we really go hard in that space.”
NC IDEA Grant Tees up 2020 Growth Plans
The startup, which is entirely bootstrapped, has been able to sustain itself without venture or angel funding. But the founders recently opened a fundraising round aiming to attract angel investors.
This move comes as Pip & Grow was recently one of six startups to be awarded $50,000 (of $300,000 total) in NC IDEA’s Fall 2019 SEED grant cycle. Before this, Pip & Grow was also one of three winners in the 2018 SCORE American Small Business Championship, receiving $15,000 in cash, in addition to receiving SCORE’s Outstanding Retail Small Business Award.
“The NC IDEA grant was a stamp of approval from a reliable source from within the state,” Compton Barr says. “There’s so much interest in angel investing within the Lake Norman community.”
Looking ahead to 2020, Compton Barr says Pip & Grow’s immediate plans involve anticipating the CPSC standards and building its B2B foundation along the way. She added, “We also want to use the credibility we build by being distributed through hospital systems to also build customer education and awareness with the product, and then go into the B2C space aggressively either towards the end of 2020 or in 2021.” Pip & Grow’s team — now only Kroeker, Nau and Compton Barr — will also grow in January when they hire for new positions to help explore hospital partnerships and community programming as the CPSC guidelines are published.
Manufacturing for Good
With its minimalist style and recyclable material, the Smitten baby box easily attracts consumers who want products with a smaller footprint. Compton Barr says Smitten’s ideal consumer is affluent, highly educated families from densely populated, metropolitan areas where real estate is at a premium, such as Portland, Brooklyn and San Francisco.
Aside from its choices for materials and design, Pip & Grow also wants to distinguish its manufacturing practices. Compton Barr says Pip & Grow only works with manufacturing partners in places “where the jobs will do the most good and where our partners treat their workers well.”
“Our mission as a business is to make sure every child has a safe place to sleep, and that’s not just about a physical safe place like a baby box — it’s also about having a roof over their heads, food in their fridge and a safe, secure and nurturing environment,” Compton Barr adds. “A lot of that has to do with families having access to good jobs.” The baby boxes are made in Flint, Mich.; the sheets come from Kinston, N.C.; and the mattresses come from Atlanta.
“We’re hoping our business can uplift all of us, and we’re out to prove that you can do good and do well,” Compton Barr says. “With our public health lens, we’re taught to zoom out and look at health problems from a broader environmental or sociological perspective and try to understand how changes on these outer rings can lead to changes for individuals or for specific families. This is probably the place where our public health [expertise] has been an advantage for us.”
