Amid a growing baby products market expected to reach 25.4 billion by 2028, Poppylist, a new online baby registry, is making it easier for expectant parents to find the right products for their growing families– while filtering out the stuff they don’t need.
The company, founded by two parents who were met with product fatigue from the cumbersome registries they encountered online, empowers families with unbiased product recommendations, sourced directly from a community of parents, to help them make more informed purchasing decisions. Poppylist even helps to identify products you probably don’t need to support your journey to become the best parent version of yourself. The platform is also the only one on the market that provides a seamless one-top-shop convenient for gift-givers, so friends and family members can navigate with ease without being redirected to other sites.
“When I was pregnant in 2019 with my first daughter, Amelia, I struggled to find a baby registry platform that felt like me. The options available at the time felt overly commercialized. I felt like I was being served relentless ads, which made it even more confusing than it already was to decipher a must-have from a nice-to-have, and each time I’d start adding to my registry, I felt utterly overwhelmed. And despite researching more than 40 hours debating between what stroller and crib to buy, I accidentally bought a mini crib instead of a full-size crib,” says Sarah Hollingsworth, the CEO and founder of Poppylist. “It was highly frustrating, but it was at that moment I knew there had to be a better way. I was looking for something that felt simple. And to my surprise, it didn’t exist. I remember thinking…someone else will build this; why can’t it be me?”
Seeking collaboration, Sarah unveiled the very first iteration of Poppylist in January of 2020, a simple, Squarespace website with Typeform quiz to determine “parent type”, on Product Hunt. Unexpectedly she received an email from Tamiz Ahmed, serial entrepreneur and former Global Product lead at 1 Google, a few weeks before Tamiz and his wife were expecting their first child.
“I decided to work with Sarah because, from the first call we had, it felt like a perfect match for a number of reasons. At the foundation, we were both on the same page about wanting to help parents navigate this exciting, yet confusing, time in their lives,” says Tamiz Ahmed, now CTO and co-founder of Poppylist. “Poppylist was the first site I came to that wasn’t trying to push wipe and bottle warmers onto me, two things that I knew I didn’t want to get my baby used to, but figured I had to get them both given how they were listed on all other registry platforms. Fast forward 3 years and 2 babies, I never bought either of these products, and my babies both became extremely adaptable.”
Unlike Amazon or Babylist, Poppylist’s catalogue is universal and encourages parents to add products from any online store. It’s also the only baby registry on the market that offers delayed delivery, giving you the flexibility of deciding when you want a gift delivered, rather than storing products before you need them. Realizing that things can change on a dime when it comes to parenting, Poppylist makes exchanging items before they’ve shipped, or exchanging gifts for cash, a piece of cake.
To simplify the journey into parenthood, the company developed, “Ask Poppy”, an AI chatbot for all the 24/7 pregnancy, postpartum and baby advice a parent could want, at their fingertips. Paired with parenting resources that Hollingsworth and Ahmed had only dreamed of, Poppylist hosts “Solicited Advice”, a biweekly webinar, that’s both unbiased and unfiltered, featuring experts on anything from surviving sleep deprivation to building a practical wardrobe for your newborn.
