How Our Baby Product Went From Zero to $100K/Month In Just ONE Year
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi! My name is Brittany and I’m one of the founders of Vonu. We started the company less than a year ago as brand-new parents. We specialize in products that offer support and common sense solutions for families everywhere.
Our current hero product is the Vonu Lounger, a multi-use lounger that helps with tummy time, reflux relief, burping, and gas relief, and encourages face-to-face time with your little one.
Our memory foam Lounger provides a 4-in-1 solution to many problems little ones face. Its incline mimics the shoulder of a caregiver, allowing babies to get the digestive relief they deserve. An elevated incline also provides an improved field of view, making tummy time enjoyable.
As of right now, we’re less than a year in, and over 10,000 babies and parents have found relief with the Vonu Lounger. We are revving $100K monthly and have less than a 1% return rate.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
In 2023 our co-founder, Davante and I became parents for the first time and anyone who has children understands that those first few weeks are filled with sleep deprivation, a ton of questions, an immense amount of newfound love, and takeout.
We live states away from both of our families, leaving us with very little local support in the beginning. Our daughter began having trouble sleeping and was exceptionally miserable towards the second half of the day. Her gas pains had her and us up throughout the night. We realized that keeping her elevated immediately after a feeding helped prevent gas bubbles from being trapped in her abdomen.
After using a piece of my maternity pillow we came up with the idea for the lounger and decided we had to at least try creating it. I felt like I could make the first version myself so I got started on it. I had no personal experience with R&D but my husband and co-founder is an inventor with granted patents.
He led the process of R&D and I supported design input. Because of his experience, we were able to get from an idea to an in-hand sample within 90 days.
Don’t be afraid to fail. None of the successful entrepreneurs you know or admire got it right with their first idea but without that failure, they wouldn't have ever gotten it right.
At the time I was postpartum and working full-time in PR and my law-degree-holding husband was working part-time at Domino’s while continuing to pursue entrepreneurship. Davante has started and run multiple successful businesses over the years, and Vonu has been the culmination of many lessons.
We were balancing our personal lives as well as the inception of Vonu. There were many late nights and early mornings.
Once we received our first sample, and it worked, we knew we had to share our invention with other parents. I longed for community and additional support and realized sharing Vonu was a way to create that space.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
To even test the angle and incline of the lounger for the tech pack that needed to be drafted for the manufacturer, I created one at home. I ordered a memory foam mattress topper on Amazon and used an electric carving knife to shape the lounger's layers.
Created quite a mess on the dining room table between my work meetings but it was an afternoon well spent. We ended up with the first Vonu Lounger which we called a “Burplee” at the time.
Once we had the prototype, I found a local seamstress to create the first covers. Ultimately the quality of the prototype was poor but it gave us enough information to move forward. At that point, we worked with a product designer and then a renderer. Once the tech-pack was produced we found and vetted a manufacturer that created a mold and shipped us our first 12 samples.
We ended up using a sourcing agent to find our manufacturer and she made the process seamless. She took care of visiting different factories and set up introduction meetings for us to ask questions and see the facilities.
Ultimately we chose a manufacturer that was small enough to make our business a priority but technically and logistically capable of growing with us. We’ve fostered a great relationship with our manufacturer and sourcing agent, meeting frequently and planning have been pivotal to our growth and inventory management.
Describe the process of launching the business.
A major key in our launch was our organic strategy. We initially focused on testing creatives organically through my personal TikTok account. My personal account focused on the woes and questions of motherhood at the time. It was a place for me to share, learn, and connect in those initial postpartum days that seemed so isolating. We created a video that chronicled the journey to launch. It included images and videos of our daughter in pain from her gas, the ideation and creation process of the lounger, receiving our initial samples, etc.
Our initial brand of “Burplee,” had a different aesthetic than Vonu today. We started with very playful and bubbly designs and people loved it. We had raised $45,000 from family and friends and ordered our first shipment of loungers. The money covered inventory, website design and coding, packaging, a brand photoshoot, and Meta ad spending.
We decided from the beginning that I would focus most of my attention on customer service and community building. In the beginning, I hand-wrote ‘Thank You’ notes to each customer to be shipped with their order. I had no idea what was coming and how quickly that would become unsustainable.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
We started running Meta ads in August of 2023 and by March of 2024, we completely revamped our brand, name, and aesthetic. We changed our name from Burplee to Vonu and decided our original aesthetic needed to be refined to keep up with the new product offerings and expansion we were planning. Vonu means new hope, which is exactly what children are.
We updated the look and feel of our branding to something more sleek and targeted to the adults making the purchase. Our return rate was cut in half and our conversion rate climbed by nearly 1% post rebranding. I would recommend making these types of changes as early on as possible. The revamp uprooted our progress and forced us to start our Meta-learnings over due to an error with our pixel.
Once we recovered from this setback we focused our efforts on building out our creative library, building stronger testing frameworks for Meta ads, and putting energy into sharing organic social proof.
We ended up meeting a Forbes writer who did a story about our humble beginnings and trajectory. This feature increased our visibility and added credibility to our brand.
We use our social proof and UGC to build a community around the brand and the Vonu Lounger. We’ve created a VIP Facebook group that we’re growing to share sneak peeks, take polls, get feedback, and offer exclusive discounts. The hope is that we can grow this community and have more meaningful conversations and collaborations as the company grows. It’s important to me as a mom and founder to be authentic and legitimately helpful.
Davante has led the charge on Meta ad buying and has found great success. He’s created a framework for each ad set that we test and confer with other successful media buyers on the ever-changing landscape. We are gearing up to test a lot and test quickly, something we've learned from a few brands we follow with much larger budgets. We decided long ago that anything can be done at the appropriate scale and budget so we don’t allow much to intimidate us.
As for Amazon, it’s a beast! We’re just getting started and highly recommend outsourcing with an agency. There is a lot of red tape and the set-up is meticulous. We work with the team at Arvanza and it’s been great so far.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Vonu is less than a year old at this point and we’re growing exponentially. I remember the weeks leading up to our Meta launch just sitting and thinking to myself, “Is anyone going to buy this? Is this something we should’ve kept to ourselves? Nobody is actually going to buy this.”
Thank God I was very wrong! I don’t often lift my head up to look back but we’ve had some great moments in this first year so I know it’s only up from here!
About 98% of our sales are through our online store currently. We’re currently easing into Amazon with FBM, we should be FBA in the next 60 days and I expect to see a huge increase in Amazon’s attribution. As we know, Amazon adds a ton of validity to a product and people feel comfortable making that purchase.
We are currently in the middle of launching 5 new products with another few behind those in the R&D stage. We are adding products to our catalog that make sense to purchase when you’re coming to our site for the lounger, thus increasing AOV and LTV even.
We have the baby’s first walking shoes, crawling knee pads and grip socks, tummy time engagement cards, all-natural heating pads for gas relief, and an organic magnesium lotion. The expansion to International markets will follow in the Spring of 2025.
As far as the future goes, we have a lot more in store. Growing our community, creating new and meaningful products, and of course increasing our revenue are the priorities. With such a small team the journey requires diligence, authenticity and passion. Luckily, we’re overflowing with all three.
To survive in today's ecomm climate you MUST emphasize Average Order Value and Lifetime Value from the beginning. These two metrics can take your business from the red to printing money.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
We’ve learned so much in a short period, myself in particular. Davante and Greg, our Co-founder, have been entrepreneurs for nearly a decade and have worked together on multiple ventures. They’ve had the opportunity to showcase their learnings and evolution as entrepreneurs with Vonu.
Earlier this year we were fulfilling out of our garage, meaning inventory was being delivered to our home. We were expecting our largest delivery and most likely our last due to space constraints. We assumed the forwarder understood the goods would be delivered to a residence, but that was not the case.
We ended up manually unloading 11 pallets without a lift gate from an 18-wheeler at 2 am while our daughter was sound asleep in her crib. Do not recommend it! Our largest lesson in logistics and forwarding was learned that morning.
I can’t say that I’d recommend launching your business in Q4 unless you have a ton of capital to hit the ground running. Introducing and pushing a new product amidst the noise of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, winter Holidays, etc. with already established products and services is not for the faint of heart.
The major learning we’ve all been on the same page about is systems. Davante, Greg, and I have spent copious amounts of time creating systems and processes for everything we do within Vonu. Through our different roles, we’ve come to realize that all the ideas, inspiration, and desires are nothing without a system to implement them.
The greatest part about Vonu is our target audience. People are becoming parents every single day and they’re excited about it. They’re not hard to find and our product catalog can expand indefinitely to increase our lifetime value.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Meta has been a cornerstone in Vonu’s growth and has proved itself invaluable. Davante, our co-founder, taught himself how to buy media a few months into building Vonu and has done an incredible job creating a paid media team around him. Our creative director is our only full-time employee and she manages a team of designers and editors that are being trained to create ads constantly.
We use Klaviyo for our email flows and campaigns, Finaloop for accounting at this stage, Opinew for website reviews, UpWork for all contract work, and we live and die by Slack and Notion. We recently hired someone to professionally organize and build out our workflows in Notion across all departments and it’s increased efficiency and productivity substantially. Worth the time and money spent!
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Honestly, I don’t have time to read books in this season of my life. The most I get is a chance to listen to YouTube videos while working or an audiobook if I’m lucky. We have an 18-month-old daughter and an 11-month-old business so there’s not much downtime.
I subscribe to a few newsletters that I find insightful. There's Sara Blakely from Spanx, Sarah Levinger (psychology-based marketing), and Chris Meade from CROSSNET and Founders Club.
When I want to learn more about Meta, ad-buying, and performance I tune into Dara Denney, Charley T, and Phoenix Ha. As a founder building a personal brand, I try to keep my social media channels with timelines of other founders creating great content and sharing the journey. It’s important to find value across markets and styles, a bit of cross-pollination has been beneficial for our company and our mindset.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
To survive in today's ecomm climate you MUST emphasize Average Order Value and Lifetime Value from the beginning. These two metrics can take your business from the red to printing money. Please test as much as you can as quickly as you can about ads. It’s helpful to get that feedback quickly so you can either change course or double down.
Make sure your offer is the right fit for your audience and your business model. Look at your customer persona and work backward from there, it’ll help you determine price, ad copy, tone, etc. Don’t be afraid to fail. None of the successful entrepreneurs you know or admire got it right with their first idea but without that failure, they wouldn't have ever gotten it right.
Lastly, as any entrepreneur knows, the work is never finished, we just run out of time.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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