Baby Talk: How Lalo is Changing the Buying Experience for New Parents
Michael Wieder, Co-Founder, President, and CMO of Lalo, discusses connecting with and creating the best shopping experience for new parents
How new parents shop for their babies is unlike how anyone shops for anything else. I know, I’ve been there. You’re anxious, you’re thinking about all the things your baby will need, but you’re also thinking in stages of what you’ll need three months from now when your baby is in a completely different stage of development. It’s overwhelming and the brands in the baby market are mostly just selling products, and not selling how to have a better experience as a parent. Lalo is one of the unique brands that is putting the parent’s experience first, and that strategy has helped the company quickly grow into a favorite brand among moms and dads everywhere.
“The big white space, the big opportunity really revolved around, how were customers being treated, consumers being treated by the brands they were buying every day for their kids,” Michael Wieder, the co-founder of Lalo, said. “And what we uncovered through parents is that so many brands in the space make a single product that they market to parents. And it’s so product focused and it’s, ‘product, product, product, product. We’re going to tell you about this thing that’s going to be really terrible in your life if you don’t buy our product.’ Instead of this super exciting moment in your life, you’re a parent, your kid is growing every day. There’s milestones so often the only constant has changed and those are moments to celebrate. So what if we flip that on its head and said, Lalo’s here to celebrate with you to be there along every milestone, instead of telling you that you’re never going to sleep. If you don’t buy our product.”
Wieder wanted to get to the heart of the parenting experience and bring as much empathy, enthusiasm, and honesty to the experience and the products Lalo was developing To do that, Wieder said it started by going to straight to the source.
“The first step was to survey parents because neither of us were at the time, we’re both now dads,” Wieder said. “And at that time we really sunk our teeth into the customer and what they want, what they needed, what their desires were, how they shop today, how they should shop in the future. And that led us to creating Lalo. So it was definitely a couple month exploration process of the market and the consumer before diving into, what are we going to make and what are we going to sell?”
Lalo takes product development seriously, and Wieder says that even if the products Lalo makes are more expensive than what is on the market, if you’re communicating effectively, you’ll be able to show your worth.
“In terms of communicating value to a customer, to make sure that we’re increasing conversion rate and getting people to buy our products, we break it down into benefits,” Wieder said. “So we work through a framework that one of our advisors introduced us to that focuses on technical, functional and emotional benefit. The technical benefits of how is this thing made? What is it made of? The functional benefits? How does it work? What function does it give me in my life? And then the emotional benefits of how does it make me feel? So by breaking it down like that, that ends up being really, really clear messaging, pillars and value that you can communicate to your customer.”
Parents should be valued, and they should be listened to. That’s the Lalo way, and it’s been working out. To hear how well, tune into Up Next in Commerce.
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