The baby care and mother care brand ranks first among parenting apps on Google Play Store
Bengaluru: Mylo is an ITC-backed leading full-stack parenting platform for new and expecting mothers. Apart from its line of D2C baby care and mother care products, Mylo provides an online Q&A-based social community, digital health tools, informational content on pregnancy, baby care and wellness by medical professionals and vetted experts, and online consultations with doctors.
Bridging gaps
Mylo was launched in 2018 by Vinit Garg after he noticed that vetted, detailed information on pregnancy and baby care was not easily accessible online. Mylo began as a free-to-use app with trusted content for pregnant women and young mothers. The app facilitated access to educational resources by hosting a community platform for mothers (the number of mothers stands at over five million today), where a woman at any stage of life (be it conception, pregnancy or early motherhood) would receive personalised content feed suited to her needs. Later, Mylo also forayed into the D2C baby care and mother care segment, offering skin care and hair care products, pregnancy pillows, maternity wear and daily essentials.
“The content and community platform continues to be the heart of our brand. However, we found that users on the Mylo app often discussed suitable baby care or mother care products to meet their needs and that their interaction with products in the category was strongly influenced by word-of-mouth advertising. This led to the development of Mylo’s line of D2C products, enabling it to become a full-stack platform for new and expecting mothers,” explains Garg.
What helps the brand in this regard is that the baby care and mother care segment in India has been growing rapidly. “Rising birth rates and incomes, which have increased per capita expenditure on children, along with growing consumer demand for naturally-derived baby care and skin care products, have driven the segment’s growth. According to a report by Technavio, the mother and baby care segment in India is predicted to grow by $26.35 billion at a CAGR [compound annual growth rate] of 11% from 2020 to 2025,” shares Garg.
Surging ahead
Mylo follows a content-to-community-to-commerce approach, where users share their needs, thereby guiding the brand’s product development process, and eventually promoting its products in the community. “By having user conversations on our platform as the backbone of our product development process, we have been able to create highly useful baby care and mother care products that meet mothers’ specific needs,” says Garg.
Mylo’s business model thus focuses on developing a variety of valuable content and digital health tools for expecting and young mothers at various phases of their lives, to increase community conversions for the brand’s products and services. “We have also been able to promote high engagement among users through a learn-share-buy methodology, which results in strong top-of-mind recall and purchase conversion,” says Garg. Mylo, he continues, does not have to dedicate many financial resources towards customer acquisition as a result.
What differentiates Mylo from other D2C brands offering pregnancy and parenting resources is that it has built an empathetic and trusted digital community support system where women express themselves freely. “To encourage women to talk about their issues and deepest concerns, we take several initiatives, such as allowing them to be pseudo-anonymous or anonymous on the platform,” adds Garg.
In the next 5-10 years, Mylo plans to become a global D2C brand. It will expand its presence to other Commonwealth markets, with its suite of English educational content suitable for expecting and new mothers. “Furthermore, to meet the needs of India’s diverse population, we plan to adapt Mylo’s content and community platform to all major languages in the country. To this end, we recently launched the Mylo app in the Bengali language to cater to users in the state of West Bengal in India and also in Bangladesh, where it is already one of the top parenting apps,” says.
For Garg and his team, the long-term objective is to have 100 million users engaging with Mylo so that it becomes the highest-authority platform globally in the mother care and baby care category.
Brownie Points
- In 2020, the Mylo app got one million downloads. By 2022, the number has gone to five million.
- Mylo ranks first among parenting apps on Google Play Store.
- It received $17 million in funding (in a Series B round) in March 2022.
- Between March 2021 and March 2022, the brand’s revenue grew 10x (year on year), while its client base grew 5x in 2021.
First appeared in The India D2C Yearbook 2022
