Owlet Baby Care is a health technology company founded in 2013. The company's flagship product is the Smart Socks Baby Monitor, which uses pulse oximeter technology to track a baby's heart rate and oxygen levels during sleep. The health of infants and young children is monitored with wearable socks as a carrier, so that parents can view their children's vital signs in real time.
8 years, 7 rounds of financing, $178 million. After going public on July 16, 2021, Owlet Baby Care was valued at $1.07 billion. The following is the specific funding situation.
- On December 3, 2013, the seed round was completed, raising $120K;
- On April 22, 2014, the seed round was completed, raising $1.9M;
- On August 18, 2015, completed the Series A financing and raised $7M;
- On November 3, 2016, completed the B round of financing and raised $15M;
- On May 8, 2018, completed the B round of financing and raised $24M;
- On July 16, 2021, the ipohon was completed with a total offering of $130M.
Owlet's mission is to provide parents with the right information at the right time to ensure the safety of every baby. The goal is to reach more moms. Owlet Baby Care wanted to increase new parents' awareness and affinity for their brand and increase sales of baby monitors.
1 First Point
Learn about Owlet Baby Care
1.1 Out of concern for the health of wives and offspring
"I started this company because I was worried about it." Walkman, the founder of Owlet Baby Care, once said. "My wife had three heart surgeries. When she was born, her heart problems were not taken seriously, so she returned home from the hospital. After 10 days, her mother ghostly made god feel that something was wrong, and when she walked into the baby room, she found that she was no longer breathing. Her family rushed her to the hospital and had open surgery to save her life. ”
Although the mother's intuition saved his wife's life, Walkman did not want to rely on intuition to dominate the direction of things all the time. Knowing that his children were also at risk of the disease, he began to gain insight into how a pulse oximeter, a medical device used to measure oxygen in the blood, works. While the device is common in hospitals, Walkman envisions that if the technology can be reduced in size and reduced costs for use at home, it will save more babies' lives.
1.2 Keen market insight as an "old entrepreneur"
As an "entrepreneur" who has been in the business world for many years. At the age of 12, Walkerman ran a paintball company in his backyard and, in high school, started a flooring and tile business.
In 2013, Walkerman, who studied chemical engineering at Brigham Young University, partnered with fellow business, engineering and chemistry students to form Owlet Baby Care. The founders sent a survey report to friends around them describing their imaginary products. Among them was a photograph of a baby passing through PS with a watch on his ankle. This move also attracted a fierce response from friends.
Initially, the partners planned to release the product on Kickstarter, but because the baby product was not supported at the time, it was disqualified. They then continued to raise money on the "self-starter" crowdfunding platform and managed to raise $140,000 from 840 supporters.
Since then, the team has participated in several student business competitions at Brigham Young University and eventually won about $200,000. They also joined the TechStars Accelerator Project in New York as part of a 2013 cohort to expand their network, seek mentorship, and seek additional funding. Walkerman says it was the early choices that laid the groundwork for the company's philosophy for years to come.
While running techStars, the founders spent crowdfunding and produced 2,000 devices that didn't work the way they wanted. Are you going to continue to use these devices? Or throw them away and use other fundraising as a refund for the customer? This is a major decision.
Eventually they decided to throw away the original device.
"It was one of the best decisions we've ever made. We've refocused our efforts to focus on speed and instead develop products that parents can trust, love, and feel at ease. This allowed us to build a business that is now worth $110 million, and now we're going public. "Since then, a relentless focus on product quality has been etched into the company's DNA. ”
As new parents, these moms and dads didn't know a lot about how to care for their newborns when they brought their babies home from the hospital. So, when Owlet's feedback was basically "how the product gave us the information we needed so we could take care of our baby at the right time," the founders were overjoyed.
2 Second Point
Owlet Baby Care's growth strategy
2.1 Tell the brand story well and feel the most real data power
On July 3, 2019, Owlet published an article on its blog titled "Evidence of Peace of Mind: Data from 47,495 Owlet Users Summarized in Pediatric Journals," which is the brand's conclusions from clinical studies and observations, and the first one it plans to publish.
By providing parents with the right information at the right time, it is in line with Owlet's mission to better care for babies at home. As one of the pioneers of baby home monitoring, Owlet increasingly feels that brands have a responsibility and obligation to provide parents with superior technology and absolute peace of mind.
In the process of sinking and developing the mother and baby market, Owlet has gradually become a health monitor for countless families. Backed by more specialized, authoritative theories, unique data from nearly 50,000 newborns validate the conclusion that many have already felt or experienced: smart socks can reduce anxiety in parents, improve mom and dad sleep, and be easy to use.
The journal Global Pediatric Health, published in the observations, as a peer-reviewed professional journal, has once again strengthened the authenticity of the research data.
We've listed some of the data that Owlet embodies in the blog for everyone to feel the "real power" of data:
- Evidence of "peace of mind": 96% of parents who use Owlet feel less anxious, which refutes long-standing theories that home monitoring causes parents to be more anxious.
- Better sleep for parents: 94% of parents report better sleep quality when using Owlet smart socks.
- Millennial parents with intergenerational shifts and intellectual empowerment: 75% use home monitoring for peace of mind or want to know more about their children.
- Healthcare confidence: 37% of Owlet users have at least one healthcare industry professional in their households.
- Safe Sleep for Babies: 82 percent of parents say they will practice the American Academy of Pediatrics's (AAP) Guidelines for Safe Sleep.
Trout, the master of marketing strategy, once mentioned, "To do a good job in marketing is to tell a good brand story." Advertising is all about telling the story of your brand to your customers and potential customers. It is a tool that juxtaposes with PR and promotions".
Owlet presents the most authentic, scrutinized and tested data to customers, and the quality of its products goes without saying. After countless days and nights, doing thousands of tests, condensing the product introduction into a short value and presenting it to customers, this is the best brand story at the moment of the information explosion.
2.2 Leverage social media to build meaningful advertising creative
During the COVID-19 pandemic, creative advertising in the studio is often restricted and production costs can be high. As a result, Owlet Baby Care's marketing team came up with the idea of leveraging social media, such as Facebook, and producing new advertising ideas directly within the platform at a lower cost.
To see if this new ad creative resonates with new parents and reaps similar revenue to previous ad creatives, the team conducted an A/B-test:
A: The new video ad uses relaxing visuals, including soft color illustrations and eye-catching light movements, to show a baby sleeping in an Owlet Smart Sock 3 baby monitor. Text overrides describe how the product reassures parents. (Pictured below)
B: Previously, the video ad produced by the studio first guided everyone to focus on the product through text: "Meet the new Owlet smart socks." The smartest baby monitor in its class", which then shows babies wearing smart socks in a crib and switches the shots at the end of the ad to show a separate product shot. (Pictured below)
Both versions of the ad used the same static message "The award-winning Smart Socks are the first monitors to track your baby's oxygen and heart rate, notifying you when your baby needs you" to drive univariate testing. And uniformly added a "shop now" call-to-action button, you can jump directly to the Owlet website.
The team used the platform's built-in auto-delivery feature to give Facebook a precise push based on big data: which placements are most likely to drive the best marketing campaigns in the shortest time and at the lowest cost, and to run ads across all Facebook apps and services. In addition, automatic advanced matching is used to pinpoint specific users.
The results of this marketing creative optimization:
- ROI of advertising: 16% increase;
- Average cost per purchase: 60% reduction
- Average order price: 19% increase
- Click-through rate: 55% increase.
Seth Lovegreen, director of digital marketing at Owlet Baby Care, said: "Knowing that new moms suffer from information overload, we focused on creating amazing ad creatives that would stop moms and think about Smart Sock. This Facebook campaign proves the importance of creating a visual story that sells product features while staying true to our brand promise of giving parents peace of mind. ”
Review the strategies Owlet Baby Care used in this marketing campaign:
2.3 Leverage e-commerce live broadcasting to stimulate deep product perception
After the market share stabilizes, how to break the bottleneck to further stimulate growth?
Owlet is targeting the live streaming track that has hot traffic today, hoping to raise awareness of its products and brands while showing the efficacy of its baby monitoring products in real time. The basic appeal of the early Owlet is as follows:
- Improve product perception of old customers;
- Get more new customers;
- Display product functions and specific usage;
Eventually, Owlet partnered with Amazon and set up a dedicated studio at its headquarters in Utah with cribs, two consoles, and Owlet products ready for display.
After the live broadcast, the team's digital marketing experts measured the revenue effect of the event and calculated the value contribution of the live broadcast to the overall sales of the brand. The team found a spike in Owlet's product sales, page jumps, and consulting sessions during the event.
During the week of Amazon Live Events and Sales, Owlet's:
- Sales increased by approximately 9-16%;
- In the best-selling ranking, smart monitoring socks rose by 70%; intelligent monitoring rose by 69%;
Anderson, Owlet's vice president of sales, said: "This decision expands our ability to take advantage of sales-driven opportunities that we can't address on our own. ”
Using live streaming, Owlet has witnessed the power of the fan effect. The continuous exposure of the product allows the brand to break through the bottleneck and continue to accumulate fans, and the audiovisual experience of the product, with detailed explanations and usage instructions, also greatly reduces the trust cost between customers and brands. Therefore, when your brand encounters a growth bottleneck, you may also consider the combination of "private domain traffic operation + back-end resource integration" to achieve a new breakthrough.
2.4 Launch a series of products to maximize brand value
As mentioned earlier, Owlet's "ingenuity" of quizzes is mentioned, and in addition to giving parents peace of mind, Owlet also collects research data that does not exist anywhere else.
"Owlet collects the largest amount of infant health data ever," Walkman said, "and we have 12 ongoing studies and recently published a study on SVT with the Cleveland Clinic."
SVT (Analysys Note: supraventricular tachycardia, abbreviated as "supraventricular tachycardia", is one of the most common arrhythmias. ) is a condition in which a baby's heart beats rapidly or has arrhythmias. Walkman said there was little data on SVT before Owlet decided to conduct the study. "We have some data from hospitals and clinics, but no data from households. They found that the incidence of infant SVT was 10 times higher than we had previously thought. I think Owlet will play an important role in the future and revolutionizing children's health care. ”
Based on these studies, Owlet decided to provide customers with more value-added mother and baby lessons to help new mothers navigate the early stages of unskilled parenting.
In 2019, Owlet launched a revolutionary new sleep training program: Dream Lab, a one-of-a-kind personalized video lesson program designed to use the scientific method to train babies to learn to fall asleep quickly in seven days. The birth of Dream Lab heralded the direction of the company. Based on data collected from connected baby-rearing devices, Walkman said, "we want to expand to areas such as fertility guidance, childbirth guidance, lactation counseling and guidance."
The Owlet Dream Lab course has practical knowledge of sleep learning, and the target audience is clearly "the elite of Los Angeles". This "smart course" provides customers with a comprehensive assessment of their children's needs, as well as specific feedback on what keeps children up at night and provides customers with practical and useful training methods. Parents, after being guided by a series of lessons, can even know when their child should take a nap next time.
"We are digitizing the experience of quality sleep consultants so that everyone can be taught by the best sleep consultants in the world. We are excited to popularize world-class, personalized sleep training advice so that every parent can help their child fall asleep quickly and smoothly. ”
Dream Lab was created by the Owlet brand in collaboration with a clinical social worker and a master of social work. These two experts pioneered the sleep training industry and have over 40 years of experience as individual children's sleep consultants. They have helped more than 500,000 children get better nighttime sleep.
A paediatric sleep consultant said: "Parents will benefit from over 45 minutes of expertly guided HD video content to guide their child into a full sleep. They will also enjoy the support provided by the course, giving them the confidence to stick to their specific sleep plan. Parents can even learn how to wean their children at night and help their children get quality naps. It's a win-win for everyone in the family! ”
To date, more than 700 parents have joined Dream Lab's sleep teaching, and the results released by Owlet are truly shocking. Owlet's brand value has also been rising after the launch of the mother and baby series products one by one.
When your brand's "star products" are already perfect, you may wish to try to develop some products that can really meet the spiritual level of customers, focusing on high-quality services to stimulate maximum brand value.
Translation: Analys Ark Content Operator Liu Zixuan
Reference Articles:
[1] B Magazine. Behind the Brand; Kurt Workman of Owlet Baby Care. 2019-03-20.
[2] Avnet. The Story of Owlet: Hope, fear and inspiration.
[3] Owlet. Evidence for Peace of Mind —— Data on 47, 495 Owlet Users Summarized in a Pediatric Journal. 2019-07-03.
[4] Pattern. Case Study——Owlet: Amazon Live Event. 2019-03.
[5] Owlet. Owlet Baby Care Announces Dream Lab™: An Innovative, Personalized Video Sleep Course for Infants.
[6] Interface News. Win by appearance? New mother and baby consumer brand Babycare completed a 700 million yuan Series B financing. 2021-02-03
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