A Sustainable Brand

SuperBottoms is a sustainable mom and baby essentials brand that claims to offer high-performance, skin-friendly, sustainable and cost-efficient cloth diapers in India. It is a digital-first brand, a new concept in a space dominated by large players. The primary selling channel remains the brand website, adopting a direct-to-consumer business model.  

A three-year-old VC funded startup, SuperBottoms raised a Series A round and has a stable revenue growth. The quality of its products was endorsed when it was safety tested as per the American Child Product Safety Standards. 

The First Steps 

“My entrepreneurial journey began when my baby got his first diaper rash. That got me searching for a diaper that would be gentle on the skin and also on the planet, yet be convenient,” says Pallavi Utagi. With a desire to address the gap, the marketing and consumer brand building professional, Utagi donned the entrepreneurial hat and launched SuperBottoms after immense testing, trials and research.  

Initially, adding well-qualified members to the team proved to be a challenging task for a bootstrapped company. With limited resources on hand, introducing a new concept to more parents and educating them was another big challenge to overcome. The brand was focused deeply on developing and continuously improving product basis customer feedback.  

The Wider Call 

As the company grew, the idea to ask some of the mom-customers across India to join the team for a few hours was born. These were qualified people, who were on a maternity break and sought certain flexibility at work. This move also worked as channel partners, as it ensured that word-of-mouth remained the dominant marketing tool. 

The company today has a team of over100, with 80 per cent mothers and a community of over 1 lakh parents that actively take cloth diapering to more parents in India.  

The brand faces the challenge of getting copied easily as a product, and therefore it had to build non-replicable competitive advantages. “We invested a lot of effort in the central pillars, product improvisations, customer support and service, and community to combat this,” says Utagi.