Challengers in the saturated baby market

Standing out in a crowded market

The baby market is very saturated in the UK. There are hundreds of brands to choose from, some which are hundreds of years old and have held many royal babies, and others that have been whipped up on ChatGPT by new parents who don't want to go back after maternity leave. It is an overwhelming market to find the best baby gear for you and your new family.

Researching the market and the competitors, it quickly became apparent that every company was designing 'Babyish' branding. Same scribe lettering and cartoon baby line drawings. They were carbon copies of each other. Right from the legacy brands to the challenges. Bababing, included.

We decided to design this brand for adults. Loud and proud. Parents still wanted their own identities, they didn't want to lose their selves to become a parent. They didn't need babying by their pram manufacturer, they wanted to be educated and treated like adults. That's why we created a brand persona that focused on clean and simple language, with tongue in cheek humour and bold, ballsy branding. No more babying.

The results

I worked on Bababing for over 3 years and I am always happy to chat with one of the three founders when I see them. They are great guys who were proud of the work we did together and what we achieved in those years.

When I first joined the account, they had just had a record year after the post-covid baby-boom. The goal in the following year was to maintain a similar level of success and update the branding to the more ballsy adult branding. This was a success, they maintained the same performance with a slower baby year and rolled out the new branding. I joined part way through this year and helped drive a massive Black Friday promotion that helped claw back some of the lost ground at the start of the year.

Following this, we have 2 consecutive record breaking years, and were on track to beat that again when I moved on to another agency. In my final year, we were forecasted to be +28% YoY at the halfway point and had spent no additional budget.

The strategy

CRO was a big part of our strategy. Increasing both conversion rate and AOV was crucial to the success that we had. Bundling was a big part of this. If the purchasing process for new parents is a daunting task, why not incentivise getting it all in one clean sweep?

I introduced pram bundles, sleep bundles, and changing bag bundles. Effectively increasing the AOV on most orders. The cart upsell that I built, focused on promoting relevant products to each basket, or upgrading their basket to a bundle - if they weren't bundling already. This was back in the days of Google Optimise (RIP), so we could monitor how effective these were and found that 14.5% of users would change their order from one or two small items to a full bundle.

The biggest difference was in pram sales. In 2022, there were only 3 online pushchair sales. The year that we introduced bundling, we saw an incredible 21 pushchair sales between April and May. This is how we drove so much additional revenue with the same budget.

POAS Based Bid Strategy

Alongside this, we introduced a Profit On Ad Spend PPC strategy. Instead of training the Google algorithm to priorities revenue, we trained it prioritise profit. Meaning the bundles were infinitely stronger offerings, and way more profitable for the business. The bids were marginally more expensive, but the return was infinitely more. Selling just a changing bag on Google Shopping meant we were competing with hundreds of others and the natural race to the bottom would ensue. Distinguishing ourselves with an all in one offering allowed us to standout in this crowded market on value proposition as well as our Brand proposition.