Baba Yaga Consultancy | Amber Wan

When I first started out with my business, I was gifted a book from a former boss, he told me that this is the holy grail for new entrepreneurs. That book was “The Lean Start-up” by Eric Ries. That book shaped how many start-ups operated for the next decade (and still counting) since it came out. It played a crucial role in defining a modus operandi that is nimble, resource efficient, and properly measured. From there, many entrepreneurs have leveraged on digital retail and marketing and other means to quickly go through the cycles to gain traction.

Today’s case study is a Baba Yaga client that followed the same initial paths on their start-up journey, and soon came to point where they needed a stronger differentiator. Through this journey, as you will read – we did more than just creating a market differentiator on the outside; but a finetuning of a start-up into a resilient business model beyond MVP.

🎙: What kind of competition or challenges do start-ups typically face?

🧙🏻‍♀️: Most founders believe that their success lies with their obsession to the product, and heavy marketing at early stages to deliver “hockey stick growth” at all costs. The result is that most start-ups employ the same modus operandi in running their business and end up looking indifferent, struggling to stand out from the crowd. Our client was a baby product start-up founded by a mother that wanted to build a company that was led by values. Yet, with the limited entrepreneurship templates to follow, they were stuck in the same loop as all start-ups having limited entrepreneurship experience as a first time founder.

With the limited cash runway, they had very soon realised that heavily investing into digital and influencer marketing, PR awards, was not enough. The challenge was, how to build a solid brand quickly to differentiate themselves, whilst building a resilient company.

🎙: What challenges are baby product companies facing today? 

🧙🏻‍♀️: Unlike most consumer goods for adults, the most important aspect for clients to try a baby brand is trust, because babies cannot speak for themselves, so parents must be able to count on the brand in the first place. Some of the competitions are well-known baby product brands that already have a reputation amongst parents.

🎙: What strategy did Baba Yaga choose to improve the client’s situation?

🧙🏻‍♀️:Our solution was to guide the client through their B Corp certification process, using it as a model for value-led entrepreneurship since the get go to create a strong differentiator.

To overcome the previously mentioned challenges, Baba Yaga built a strong company management system over a four-month period, where the start-up had to work on areas that SMEs normally drag their feet on.

For instance, whilst the founder wanted to offer sustainable alternatives for baby gift products, they did not have any way to systematically validate or prove these claims during their procurement process – they would just buy based on intuition. Yet, to go through the B Corp certification process, each sustainability claim needed to be backed by product certification, data and facts. To do so, we guided the client to build proper research and procurement practices to make sure that they could maintain consistent, high quality products.This approach offered access to a special, certified niche of premium and sustainable products. What’s more, Baba Yaga got the employees involved in building training material for future teammates.

🎙: What outcomes have been seen after Baba Yaga’s intervention?

🧙🏻‍♀️: After becoming B Corp certified shortly after launch, the start-up significantly elevated its brand among competitors and gained access to a network of like-minded businesses, fostering future mutual collaborations. This recognition attracted reputable premium retailers, leading to a considerable expansion of their sales network within two years, reaching more clients than just an online retailer alone. The brand is now poised to expand its presence into the Middle East.