The Case for Constantly Evolving: How Babylist Went from Registry to Retailer

0:00I think something that's really served us intense focus, so that's saying no to things that are fantastic ideas, really having clarity as to what do we actually take on and know everything. everything you say yes to means you have to say no to like one other or five other great ideas in order to really execute that successfully. Hey, what's up? Benjamin Gottlieb here, and this is Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. Any successful brand starts with a good idea, but if you want to stick around, and I'm talking about for a long time, you've got to embrace change.

0:39BabyList is a fantastic example of this. You've probably heard of the company before. At its core, it's a registry website for expecting parents. You set up a wishlist for your new child and friends and family buy stuff. But founder and CEO Natalie Gordon has not stopped there. In the 12 years since she started her company, it's evolved from registry to content hub and now a retailer. Natalie is here today on Shopify Masters and we We are so thrilled to have her. Natalie, thanks for doing this. Hi, Benjamin. Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure, and thank you for being here. You know, we're gonna get into your brand's incredible growth throughout this interview, but if I may, let's start with the idea of BabyList, which came about when you were expecting your first child and you wanted to create a registry.

1:26It was then that you discovered it wasn't as easy as it should have been. Why not? You just went through this experience yourself, right? That's true. We have a three-month-old. That's right. Okay, perfect. So I was pregnant. I was going through this process myself where it was like, I need to choose all these products. I don't know what any of them are. I need to create a baby registry. And like nothing out there is actually what I would feel like good about sending out. Really aesthetically, everything was pink and blue with like giraffes. And it's like, I'm a modern woman. I was going to say like, I'm a boss.

2:05Like there were these things that were extremely meaningful to our family. And this is true for every family. And the two things that really come to mind, we really wanted to use a cloth diaper service and money was tight. And so anyone who could be like, I'll get you a month of diapers, that was a really meaningful gift for us. Maybe as meaningful as like a baby carrier or something you would actually get at Babies R Us. Another thing that was incredibly important to our family, our dog, our German Shepherd, she needed to be walked every morning. And it was like, if someone could do this thing that doesn't cost money, but like is actually truly meaningful, like that would be an amazing gift.

2:44So how do we ask for these things that would be so particularly important to our family? With like a registry where you can ask for things from any store, not just one store, really traditionally, registries exist like where it's a per store registry. So it's like, just have one because you're not going to find one registry. You're not going to find everything in one store and make it look good. Make it look like you're proud and you trust it to send it to friends and family and let you ask for those really specific, non-traditional items on your registry where everyone has a couple. So that was the original insight.

3:21My background's in software engineering. And so I could picture how it all worked. And it also seemed like a really fun project to tackle. Well, how convenient that your background is in software engineering because you were able to create this incredible business, which now has grown over the last 12 years, as you mentioned. But just getting back to this idea of really finding a hole in the market, you had a real life experience, something happening to you. By the way, I can't believe you were two weeks from your due date and you're building and launching this thing. But you found this hole in the market and it exploded into this now very successful business.

3:56For folks who are listening who are like, yeah, I want that. How do you put a fine point on the hole in the market? And that, again, helps you create this thing. Oh, that's a great question. I had actually had this experience with so many lessons learned prior to starting BabyList where we potentially found a hole in the market, but it was in a place where we couldn't really monetize it. So I had worked for a year on a language learning community website where actually we were able to like build it and have people come and use it, but we're never able to really make it a business. This is really a product primarily used by women.

4:37And historically, women are less likely to be able to build software, to have gone to school to build software. So I kind of had that combination where I could build a product myself. I didn't have to go out and fundraise on an idea. and I knew exactly what I wanted. And I think that actually did make it much more likely to get it right. It could become a good business and a scalable business and it could become a profitable business. Well, it definitely has. And as you've grown, however, you've for the most part stayed in this lane, right? I think the actual term is you're a vertical marketplace.

5:15You're not trying to grab every single thing. It's just baby stuff, really. How did you come to that decision of, you know what, we're going to own this area and that's it? It was like a big decision. It was a painful decision. The actual decision was, okay, are we a registry? And so if we're going to become more than a baby registry, now we should go into wedding registries and we should really learn about the wedding space. And it's really primarily about this tool and technology and that's how we should expand it. All right. Or the whole journey from marriage or from starting a family to the actual child, right?

5:50Absolutely. Or it was, does this company exist for our audience? For like the people who are having a baby, having their first baby, and like that's actually where we should be expanding. You can think of the core competencies of actually saying we would expand and we're a registry and we're going to become registries or wishlists for other life events. that's actually very squarely in our core competencies. And to say we actually want to serve this family in more and more ways and deeper and deeper ways meant we actually had to create some core competencies. But like actually with that, I think a lot of, I'd like to say strategy, but it was a little bit more like soul searching.

6:34Like who do we want to be? We really actually said, actually we think we are a life stage company. And the most important thing about this business is the trust of our users and our ability to reach this audience. And I hope our audience right now is listening to this because you have this software background. This at its core is a registry company, but you're talking about all these human elements that have gone into your decision-making, right? These tough emotional decisions and also your audience, which I think is so interesting. Let's talk about your editorial strategy for a moment. I mean, many of our listeners are entrepreneurs and they would be envious of the community you've created.

7:12How did you determine or how do you determine what products to write about and where to lean in? Because there's so much stuff out there. Let's go back in time to when we were making this decision. So we made the decision. We are really, we're going to invest, like who we are, we exist for people who are having a baby. That's like what we're going to do. And we're going to find more ways to serve them. After we made that decision, it is when we really started some of our other offerings. and at that time it was really dipping our toe into content and media. And our very first version, we brought on an intern and tasked her with creating our first best of guides.

7:56So the feedback we were getting from our users was, oh, I can add items from anywhere on the internet when I use BabyList, but you're not helping me, and this is actually really, really hard. And we knew there was a real SEO opportunity with having great content. And so she created like best strollers, best car seats, best play yards, all of these product guides that we really felt like we could show our users, but long term would be real part of our growth strategy. So in this very first version, she was tasked in survey our users, get their feedback on like how much they love their strollers.

8:34Really make sure we're talking about the strollers that most people have or that are quite accessible. Really try to write very trusted, long-form content about this. I think this might have been before Wirecutter or it might have been in parallel. And our competition was like 27 slide shows on best strollers. Okay. And we're going back in the days of the internet. By the way, full disclosure, I would make some of those slideshows when I was working in journalism, for sure. The photo slideshow, it's like, you know, this is the best that. Oh, yeah. So you saw that opportunity there. I guess what I'm getting into is what goes into making these guys, right?

9:12If I'm listening now and if I wanted to make something like this, I mean, what goes into making it exactly? We did not copy anyone else's content strategy. We said, what is true about our audience? Our audience is actually turning over every day. We're talking to people who are making these product decisions for the very first time. So our very first iteration of this was not creating content you would be reading for one year, two year, three years. It was really very evergreen content. So you can deeply invest in it and learn about it. You're going to make all these product decisions. We're going to really think about you.

9:47You don't know what these products are. So you don't even know what a diaper pail is when I'm telling you our top recommendations for diaper pails. By the way, I still don't know what a lot of this stuff is, but keep going. Sorry. I remember how confusing it was. It was like, what's the difference between a diaper bag and a bag? Like, what's special here? And so it started with a deep understanding of our audience and their journey. That is different for every audience. But we had a very good understanding of that. We launched, I think, after our guides, week-by-week pregnancy emails. And in the competitive landscape, everyone was comparing your baby to a size of fruit.

10:30And we actually compared them to like retro products from the 90s. So it was like your baby's the size of Tickle Me Elmo or your baby's the size of a Nintendo controller. And people love them. Like it just has personality and fun and celebration. It was a real brand element and still is. So that's like one answer. I think that was really necessary to not just produce content, but to produce content that people actually really respond to and engage with it and like and really tie to our brand. But like how you actually do it, we really treat it like media and we don't treat it like content marketing.

11:09We staff it and hire people who care about this audience and feel like they are actually really building like a real content driven brand. They're not writing primarily content that's all about baby list and getting you to create a baby list registry. They're actually starting with like, what is this audience really care about and how do we build a great media brand around it? And it sounds like really knowing who your audience is. My goodness, you're at such an advantage because when you were starting this company, you were the target audience, but really understanding who they are. You know, what really resonated with me is this idea that this is the first time probably most of your users are interacting with these products.

11:50So approaching it that way, it's really interesting. I have to ask you, because we're talking about your journey and part of that journey was switching to Shopify. Why did you make the switch and how were you able to scale with Shopify over these last few years in particular? BabyList has always worked across retailers. It still does. We have now decade-long relationships with our partner retailers. But we really saw a need and opportunity to be a retailer ourselves. And so what that looks like now is we work with hundreds of vendors, we hold inventory, we do some drop ship, we sell things direct.

12:25We actually are now producing some of our own products across a couple of different brands. So it really has been something that has like grown with us and been a great offering for our users. And just really quickly, when you say retailer, it's not necessarily in the traditional sense, like I'm walking into Sears, but you're saying in the modern sense, right? In the e-commerce sense. Yeah, we are an online retailer. And our very first version of doing this, how we launched is we built everything custom. I'm a software engineer. I understood what we were doing. We were kind of building this bespoke experience and really felt like that was necessary.

13:02And I think it was a couple years in, one or two years in, and our current VP of engineering, who was not at that time our engineering leader, he really raised his hand and said, we need to move to Shopify. It's going to slow us down to do this transition to it. But overall, it'll actually speed us up. And my question was, what features are we going to get? Like, how is this actually going to move our business forward? And his answer was like, A, B, and C, but that's not why we're doing this. We're actually doing this investment because they have a thousand engineers who are working on making checkout better, making cart better, like making all of this stuff work.

13:48And we have a small engineering team and we want to focus on other things. And so we did do that. We ported over to Shopify. We were scaling, we're growing. And then the conversation is, well, when are we going to outgrow Shopify? And I do think Shopify has grown with us. Like, I think if you went back in time to when we made that transition, perhaps Shopify couldn't have met our needs. But like, we've grown together in a way where when we made that transition, that wasn't really known. So I'm very happy with that decision. And so are we. So you've been able to grow with us, take away some of the engineering responsibilities that you know well, but you could focus on some other things.

14:29And in some ways, BabyList was created to help people aggregate all the products they wanted from different retailers. Natalie, that might be kind of counterintuitive to business owners who think they really want to focus on selling their own inventory, right? I mean, why do you think it's important, in other words, to write and let people add products from outside of your ecosystem on your platform? It's very specific to our audience and our registry offering. People love to be able to find the best price for products. It means if one retailer goes out of stock on a product, we're going to find that item for you at a different retailer.

15:08People absolutely love that. It lets us have really strong partnerships with retailers like Etsy, where this is their chance to really have this offering on a baby registry. So for us, it just started with putting the user and their needs, maybe ahead of like very short term ways to think about monetization. So it's a marketing play, in other words. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I would almost say it's a product marketing play because it's so deep into how BabyList works. Well, it's really fascinating. So focusing away from the short-term goals of making that conversion and trying to get someone to be really connected with your brand, perhaps not just with their own journey, but for their friends, for other parents, right?

15:51Yep, absolutely. I think we have another example going back to content where we still do this, but we actually were doing it at the very beginning as kind of a test and learn strategy. and it's in our emails, we link out to other media sites all the time. We say, oh, this is a great story on this blog or on the New York Times. This is what we're actually gonna link to in our newsletter or our emails. But that still is our strategy because we don't need to write all this content. It's not about baby list. It's actually putting our user at the center of this. Putting the user at the center and building the brand, each individual piece of communication as its own reliable resource that's trusted that your audience has confidence in, seems to be really working out for Natalie Gordon, the founder and CEO of BabyList, who is my guest today.

16:43And if I may, I'd like to take a moment and thank you, yes, you, for listening to our podcast. You know, each week we bring you stories from Shopify founders and industry experts about everything entrepreneurship. And if you're digging what we've got going on, do us a favor and make sure to give Shopify Masters a follow or subscribe to the show wherever you're listening right now. You can also let us know your thoughts by leaving a review. Thank you so much for listening. Natalie, I think the experience of becoming a parent has changed a lot in the past decade. Do you think there are fundamental differences in the way people are parenting now versus when you start a baby list?

17:21I think that's such an interesting question in our space, going back to every day there are people and they're having their first baby and that's who we really need to serve. I think fundamentally becoming a parent is the same. You want to be a great mom. You want to be a great dad. You care about the health of your growing family. You have the same needs. And it's so important. It's so emotional. It's such a point of connection. But like we said, this business was able to get off the ground partially because of like my deep understanding and empathy for this user. And now I have a 12 and a half year old.

17:57I'm not in this stage anymore. And things have definitely changed. I think it's really important for us to not become a stale legacy brand ripe for disruption.

18:13In 12 and a half years, we actually have had to reinvent our brand. Maybe not reinvent our core offering, but really reinvent the voice in how we talk to our users. really tactically, we started deeply investing in TikTok a year and a half ago. We said, where are our users? Actually, they've really shifted platforms or really in addition to platforms they'd previously been on. Now they are on TikTok. We have now over a million followers on TikTok. And you're the biggest baby brand on TikTok at this point. I believe so. Yeah. And that's like, I think just an example of being the brand. Actually, in making that decision, we said, if someone were going to disrupt us, what's the thing like they would do exceptionally well?

18:56And we were like, oh, they would maybe could crush us on TikTok. And it was like, great. That's where we're going to really create a brand offering. And Natalie, how does that translate to what products people are buying? Products are always changing. Twelve and a half years ago, I actually loved my baby carrier, my stroller. There's been so much innovation. The category itself is fascinating. People are spending more and more per baby every year because of new product innovation. And we're able to really bring those products to our audience and really explain the benefits. So things like baby monitors, there's a, I think you and I talked about the SNOO.

19:35Maybe you guys aren't a SNOO user, but they're just like these high-end products that really add value, particularly around sleep or feeding that really have expanded the entire baby category. I'm glad you brought up the SNU because, and again, that's not the focus of this interview, but it does bring me to an interesting question because we got a SNU because another couple, friends of ours, had one and they let us borrow it. And I'm so curious, there's a lot of camaraderie, I think, especially if you have a close-knit community in the child-rearing years where people are sharing stuff with each other.

20:08And that's a reality of being appearance, sharing clothes, sharing devices. What is your strategy along those lines with that kind of stuff? Because I would imagine that's antithetical to your business. Well, the other thing about the category is you are going to outgrow products. So the products you love the most that are for your baby, once your baby outgrows, could still be in really perfect condition or great condition. The registry, because it's not tied to this one retail experience has always worked that way. You can write in for any product you're asking for, or we'd love this gently used.

20:46So it really does work already for these hand-me-downs. We're excited about the space. We partner with a company called Goodbye Gear, and they're a resale marketplace for baby products. And you're naming this real community element. I think it's something that this next generation of parents really values, sustainability, some minimalism, and it's on our mind. And we are, I think, already actually doing a lot there. Well, tell that idea of minimalism to my family members, because I don't know if we're getting stuffed animals all the time over here. But back to the idea, you know, we mentioned earlier TikTok.

21:23I just want to get back to this really quickly. If I may, how were you able to grow on this platform that before, as you said in your own words, you were just getting beat there. You weren't winning on that space. And now you guys are crushing it. Most people listen to our program. They want to do well in the next big spot. TikTok is of course a very popular marketing platform right now. So how did you grow there? It's a great question. I think I can take no credit for this. I think I have a lot of ideas, but I should not be the person who's in charge of our TikTok strategy. So I think part of my leadership in recent years, as I've just been able to scale the company with just the most talented folks is to actually hire the right leader and then hire like the right person who's really running it on the day to day, who both have a strong vision, but also ability to like test and learn.

22:17You can't just have a strong vision because it's not necessarily going to be right. But we don't approach creating content and really creativity as like, I'm just going to throw spaghetti against a wall. It's like actually have a vision for what this can and should look like. Something I'm really excited about, we had a couple of pop-ups last year, and we'd never actually had a physical world version of BabyList. It had always been digital. We had a couple of pop-ups that really gave me and the team confidence that now is the time to really say we can have permanent physical retail, and we're opening up a flagship showroom this summer.

23:01In Beverly Hills, right? Yep, in Beverly Hills. And you just think of that space. If you were gonna reinvent all this, you would actually create like the TikTok creation space and that's gonna be built into it. So when you're going there and you're choosing all your products, you can be creating content. Our team can be creating content. You're gonna be able to test strollers on a stroller track. It's going to be very, very experiential. And so we're also, we're thinking about opportunities like that in terms of how can this really maybe take our content production to the next level. A few moments ago, you mentioned that you want to stay away from becoming the quote unquote legacy brand, which when I hear that, my initial thought is, well, why?

23:48I mean, isn't that the ultimate goal to become the legacy brand, to become the top dog, so to speak, in your industry? What is it about your vision that has you kind of staying away from this idea of becoming a legacy brand or identity and really leaning into innovation instead? Oh, I love that. I'm like, well, because we're quite ambitious. We think that there's space for there to be a very large company in the space. And we think and are really trying to become that ourselves. I think for me, legacy is really defined here as like losing touch with who your audience is. And I think it's actually very easy to do.

24:33And so when this company was just me or just me and two or three other people, I would look at competitors and I would see things they do. So this is my pet peeve. Banner ads on registries. I'd be like, I understand the KPI you are trying to hit with this. I understand that you probably did a test and you saw that adding these maybe doesn't hurt metrics in the short term. By the way, KPI, key performance indicator. Go ahead. Exactly. Like how you're judging your success. There's someone at that company and they were trying to say, we need to make more money per page view. Most of our page views are coming from registries, so we should put banner ads on registry.

25:13but like it's just the antithesis of how your users are thinking about it they are going to share this out to 50 friends and family how do they feel about sharing out something that actually has banner ads on it so just felt like very disconnected from who our core audience was and at that time I was doing all of our customer support like I was talking to our users every day which is very common if you're just starting a business you're the person on the phone or doing the emails. Oh, yeah. It was the best foundational learning and I think still being CEO of this company. But as you scale, you're like, how do we operationalize our values?

25:51How do you make sure everyone at the company can live our values? And our number one value is we love our users. And it actually looks like everyone at this company really understanding the experience our users are going through and how they think about us, how they think about the overall market, like not just relying on some hired consultant to do a focus group. To me, that's what like legacy and innovation means. Like legacy is defined as like losing touch with the experience your users are going through as an organization. We're not into innovation for innovation's sake, but we're always saying, yeah, what should we look like in one year or five years from now?