To support mums and babies during pregnancy, the fourth trimester, the breastfeeding journey and into toddlerhood, Mumma Bear aims to provide families with affordable, sustainable, everyday care solutions, eco-conscious alternatives to one-time-use products, and natural self-care products. Mum-of-two Bianca Freedman is passionate about guiding and supporting families through pregnancy and those precious first few years of parenthood. Check out the Mumma Bear story below.
Challenges
Mumma Bear was born out of challenges faced by a new mum when it came to buying mumma, baby and breastfeeding essentials for herself and her first baby during the first wave of Covid in 2020.
Whilst being a new mum was challenging enough as Bianca, founder of Mumma Bear, navigated through her first trimester – she discovered quickly that with the need to purchase online and limit in-person store visits, so many products on the market, and not wanting to make the wrong purchase decision, even doing a simple shop could quickly become a deep rabbit hole of reading reviews, asking for advice, and comparing shipping times and costs across different stores and websites both nationally and from overseas.
Not only did this new mumma find this overwhelming, but an imbalance also started to reveal itself between highly rated, good-quality products and the cost associated with those products to help her on her journey of newborn (and mum) sleep, breastfeeding and everyday care. But as a new mum and only wanting the best for herself and her new little bundle of joy, as most mums would, she bit the bullet on products she believed could help.
Roadblocks
As time progressed, and savings and paid parental leave started to run out before her return to work, Bianca found herself trying to become more budget savvy without compromising too much on the quality of products she bought – this led to more time spent researching and the realisation of the increasing gap between quality, cost and speed of delivery.
Bianca realised that unless she bought from multiple stores, looked out for the best deals, signed up to every newsletter under the sun, researching products, reviews or waiting for a sale – there was usually a payoff between speed of delivery, budget and product.
While many overseas products looked great, at a reasonable price with amazing reviews – shipping times (and sometimes costs) were less than desirable. Bianca also wanted to support Australian businesses, especially during Covid, where many businesses were being impacted.
And while many Australian businesses offered similar, highly rated products with faster shipping times – with a tightening budget, the costs could sometimes make her reconsider and opt for a longer wait time from an international brand, despite her wants to support local.
