When Marie-Claire (MC) Houtsmuller started exclusively pumping for her daughter, it was a lot.
On top of everything else new mothers go through as they adjust to their new lives, she battled with feeding from the very beginning. She ended up exclusively pumping instead, but rather than solving the issue, it just presented a whole new set of problems.
MC struggled with her first wearable pump for more than a month. It was loud, it hurt and she couldn’t do anything else while she was pumping. She developed a sense of anxiety every time she needed to pump, and it quickly became overwhelming.
She tried a different pump with similar results. Another one broke after only a few uses. She couldn’t get any help the customer service department, being told it was down to user error.
“Each time a pump didn’t quite work, it felt like another failure. It was really lonely doing it on my own as well, and eventually I just thought, ‘Maybe I should start my own business so it doesn’t have to be so hard.'”.
She figured other mums were probably having a similar experience with pumping too. That became another motivation – to help those mums by bringing to the market a premium pump that made pumping more convenient.
The Breasties
It felt like a massive step to launch a new business in a world she knew nothing about, at the same time as she adjusted to being a new mum. But MC felt she’d been pushed into a corner, relying on a pump she didn’t trust to feed her daughter. It was too big of a problem to ignore.
She walked away from her HR career (she’d actually been made redundant during her pregnancy, which is another story altogether) and went looking for a manufacturer who could help her make a pump she could stand behind.
Along with three month old Sienna, she started her second baby: BreastFriend.
“Looking back on it, that was a pretty crazy time. I created a list of everything I felt like a pump should be and features it should have, then started reaching out to manufacturers to try and find someone who could make what I needed”.
MC purchased and trialled a handful of different prototypes. When the final version arrived, it immediately clicked that this was what she’d wanted all along.
“I became my own guinea pig I guess”, she says. “By the end, I’d spent thousands researching and finding the right pump, but when the final version arrived and it was perfect, it was such a relief”.
Bringing it to life
The difference was massive, and MC immediately got a big part of her life back.
“Pretty much overnight, pumping went from being a huge drain on my energy to something I could do when it suited me. I didn’t have to plan my whole life around needing to pump, because I could pump anywhere, any time, while I was doing other things and the anxiety drifted off”.
It was cordless and wearable, meaning she could pump without being plugged into a wall. She could put the pump in her bra and actually pump hands-free – even in public without people noticing.
It had hospital-grade suction that made pumping twice as fast as it used to be. It had a night light. It was quiet. It was spill-proof. She could use any flange size she wanted.
But that was only the start. From there, MC had to navigate all sorts of background admin like registering the Breasties as a medical device, getting the required certifications, building a brand and a website, negotiating supplier agreements and more.
“There’s so much that goes into the background of setting up a business like this”, MC says. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy, especially while raising my daughter at the same time, but I’d developed this insane passion for what I was doing and I was just so driven by being able to use this product to help other mums avoid what I’d been through with pumping”.
And so, by the time Sienna was seven months old, MC had spent her life savings on her first shipment of 120 Breastie pumps. It was a whirlwind journey, and it was validated by the response from customers.
