From Baby K, With Love –
A Singaporean brand making parenthood easier with modern baby products on Amazon.com

The safety and wellbeing of children and newborns was and still is a priority for parents everywhere, us included. From the start, we’ve chosen to focus on the safety of our products, and only put out products that are certified, and that have gone through rigorous testing to ensure that they are safe for children.

Additionally, we also pride ourselves on our products' design and quality. The team conducted a lot of research to learn about parenting before even starting to work on our products to familiarize ourselves with how babies grow and what they need to develop healthily. At the time, we looked into technical things like the size of a newborn's fist, their growth cycle, the shape of a healthy head, and more, which helped a lot with product design.

For example, we took into account the size of a child's mouth when designing a baby spoon, as well as how certain shapes and materials can help prevent accidents such as choking. It was a super interesting process for us. This all goes hand-in-hand with our extensive market research to identify what kind of products are a hit with modern parents, and how we can disrupt the market with the latest and greatest designs.

With Helium 10, one feature that we find most helpful to look at is the search volume of keywords, to look at existing brands and their sales trajectory. Through this, we can then estimate get an estimate on sales volume, and product specifics like which colors are trending at the moment.

With Pickfu on the other hand, one interesting insight is that for our baby playmats, the ladybug design was super popular. Some voters left comments saying how it’s a sign of good luck, and the fact that it even has seven spots makes it even luckier, which isn’t something that us Asians would normally pay much attention to.

Amazon is our best friend in this area—through the big data it provides, we are able to delve deep into finding out what parents are looking for way before we even start our design process. Shoutout to our invaluable in-house team that works hand-in-hand with Amazon!

We always start off with keeping an active list of upcoming or potential projects that our design team will be working on. When we've come up with something more concrete, we run it through Amazon to be tested with consumers, and make adjustments based on the feedback given.

We also study the reviews of similar existing products from other companies to identify any specific consumer needs that we can address in our own version of the product. From there, we design our products to meet these needs, and then go on to see if there’s anything that we can add to it to provide additional benefits for users. For this, we like to scroll through the “People are buying this with…” section on Amazon.

One example would be our lightweight baby stroller. We noticed that most of the time, people would buy separate storage bags every time they bought a stroller from a different brand off of Amazon, so we made sure to include a large storage basket and detachable multi-purpose storage bag in our stroller design.

For existing products that we sell, we also take our own customers’ reviews into account. When we first released our baby rattle socks, we received quite a number of reviews saying that our sizes were not suitable for their babies, and that the socks slid off easily. Babies come in all shapes and sizes, and they grow up so fast, so we didn’t think it would make much sense to introduce new sizes that would have to be replaced every few months. Instead, we came up with the idea of using velcro straps to make the socks adjustable. Since then, we haven’t really received any new feedback regarding the sizing of the socks, and they continue to be one of our most popular products to this day.

Apart from tweaking product designs, we also try our best to offer additional resources to our customers to enhance their overall shopping experience with us. For instance, with our baby playpens, we realized that customers were having trouble with the assembly process through their reviews, so we filmed and uploaded a series of tutorials for our products that require more detailed setups, and included a link to it with every purchase. According to newer reviews that we’ve seen, this seems to be helping so far. We’re even designing our own version of pop-and-go playpens that have been surfacing in the market recently. They require minimal setup, which we think our customers would appreciate.

We have a few rounds of testing for all of our products, the first being from our partner who liaises with our supplier and manufacturer overseas. After he receives a sample from the factory, he will test it out for us and often send us photos and videos of him showing off the different features quite excitedly, like a happy dad playing with new toys.

Following that, he’ll send the sample over to us in Singapore, where we’ll do another round of testing just to make sure the product is stable and safe even after shipping, and whether or not the colors and materials are correct. If all’s good, we start production right after the second round of testing.

Depending on the products, this process could be completed in as fast as two weeks.

We chose to sell on Amazon because it’s the go-to website for Americans looking to purchase products online. The ready-to-purchase traffic and overall maturity of Amazon is something that drew us in as well. There are many tools available for sellers on Amazon, and these tools have consistently been refined over the years, so we know that they’re reliable.

One of the features we really appreciate is Vine reviews. How this works is that some of the most trusted reviewers on Amazon will be invited to test out newly launched products for free and post their honest thoughts about them to populate reviews and help fellow customers to make more informed decisions with their purchases. It’s an invitation-only program, so we trust that these reviews are genuine and sincere. We’ve found this feature very helpful since the start, because it’s helped us to pinpoint major problems in our designs, which has in turn allowed us to rectify and improve upon them quickly.

Another Amazon tool that we find very helpful is the new Product Opportunity Explorer tool. Previously, we used to only depend on Helium 10 to search for and analyze products. But ever since the Product Opportunity Explorer tool was released, we were able to collect even more information about which products might be more popular, or trending products that we should take note of. The data comes directly from Amazon, so it is definitely a lot more accurate than Helium 10. Now, we use both platforms together to get a better perspective when we choose new products to develop.

On Amazon’s backend, we also get to see all the numbers and data of consumers, like the search volume and growth of specific keywords, any products or brands that tend to do better than their competitors, and potential sales scores for our own products. And because the data comes directly from Amazon, we know that it’s accurate.

One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is to never assume that our products will sell well. There is a lot of effort, learning, and understanding involved in the process of creating and selling new products, from initial research to production to marketing. Every little detail that we set out to improve will contribute to the success of the product as a whole, and understanding customers’ needs is an important part of this process.

Ever since we became an Amazon Global Seller, we’ve become more mature sellers. We pay more attention to details now, and we understand that online shopping isn’t just about producing quality products—it’s also about giving customers a smooth overall experience, from the landing page to product descriptions to the checkout process. We’ve learnt a lot from analyzing the Amazon.com Global Store, and are using this to improve upon our own website and branding as a whole.

Innovate and never stop improving. There is always a brand out there that will create something new, and you have to always be aware of that, and think about whether you can create something better. Oh, and never stop listening to what your customers want or don’t want from your products. They are your voice for more ideas, so don’t neglect them and their reviews!

Previously, Amazon rolled out this virtual bundle feature where sellers could group certain products together for consumers to purchase as a set. We tried that out as well, because we saw it as an opportunity to create a sort of virtual baby hamper. The main appeal of this is that we didn’t have to physically pack everything together to make a bundle set. But what we needed to figure out was which items would go well together, and our target baby age group, so that it makes sense for parents to purchase these bundles. We did see a 5-10% improvement on some of our sales. We kept this up for about five months until we eventually decided to focus our attention on pushing out bigger products, which are much harder to bundle together as a set.

Essentially, what works for one brand might not work for another, so we’re always open to trying out new features for ourselves.

I would say our strollers. What we have is a compact, lightweight stroller, which is super easy to use and great for travel, but as I look more into the different types available in the market, I’m starting to find that it’s crazy how there are so many different types that we could explore for future designs.

I used to think that a stroller was just a stroller, but there are very specific ones like jogger strollers, tandem strollers, tricycle strollers, and many more. I think they actually have the longest history of innovation out of all the baby products out there, and the possibilities are endless, so I really enjoyed the process of researching and designing a good, compact stroller for Baby K.

We are planning to expand to South East Asia, Canada, South America and Europe. We are also thinking of setting up more brands for other regions such as Home Appliances, Furniture, etc.