How challenger brand Bobbie disrupted a $70B industry to become the fastest growing brand in the infant formula category

Bobbie are a six year old infant formula brand that have adopted a challenger brand strategy to trounce a duopoly and become the fastest growing brand in a $70B industry

👋 Hi, I'm Amanda. I'm a brand strategist and fractional CMO. I help founder-led businesses turn belief into brand—and brand into a strategic asset that works as hard as you do. I share weekly deep dives with actionable advice on brand building—plus interviews with the people in the trenches. I also work 1:1 with founders and teams. Book a chat here.

Who will love this:

• Challenger brand fans

• Brand-as-movement warriors

• Baby brand marketers

• Combo-feeders

Today

Howdy from dark and rainy Seattle!

Today’s brand is Bobbie, a DTC baby formula brand. What I love about Bobbie isn’t their lewk (though it’s great!) but the conviction they have to boldly challenge a legacy industry. They also provide a masterclass in handling a crisis.

Launched in 2018, Bobbie are:

• Valued by Pitchbook at $388 million with over $100 million in revenue (Source: Forbes)

• Backed by a ‘Motherboard’ of investors including Karlie Kloss, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, Gwyneth Paltrow, Meghan Trainor, Naomi Osaka, Karlie Kloss, Emily Oster, and Gabrielle Union

• Growing 6x faster than the infant formula market, making it the fastest-growing brand in the sector (Source: Forbes)

How are they doing it?!

Let’s dive in.

— Amanda

How Bobbie built trust amidst a nationwide formula shortage to disrupt a $70B industry 

Founded by former Airbnb Head of Hospitality Lauren Modi, Bobbie is a better-for-you infant formula, without the guilt. Infant formula is a category that sparks a LOT of feelings. Ask any mom - there’s lots of judgment, unsolicited opinions, breast-is-best advocates at the ready to judge you. Bobbie’s core customer is the parent who wants to feed their baby a better formula that what’s out there.

For parents, formula feeding is loaded with judgement - from self and others.

This is born out in the research:

• 83% of women will need to introduce formula in the first year

• 64% of these women report feeling judged about introducing formula

But the infant formula category fails to wade into the murky and emotional waters of judgement and shame. Instead, they speak in rose-tinted brand voices. Their ads claim to ‘fuel the possibilities with advanced nutrition’ or ‘fuel the wonder of your baby.’ What does that mean? Mostly, that their marketing is largely ignorable.

One of Bobbie’s investors wrote its founder, Lauren Modi, an email that articulated the category problem: “No one aspires to use formula.” Parents feel like they’re using a medical solution to feed their babies. Worse still, some feel they're failing as a parent for not being able to breastfeed. Social perception and stigma is powerful stuff. But, it can be a powerful accelerant for brands willing to challenge those perceptions. That’s exactly how Bobbie have built their brand strategy.

One of the traps I see brands fall into all the time is selling the rational benefits of their product. That’s all well and good - but that pre-supposes that we’re rational creatures, which we most certainly are not. Buying formula isn’t about giving your child enough calories to survive. Buying food to feed your child is about being a good parent - which comes with a load of emotions!

Business strategy

Bobbie’s business is simple: they sell formula. The brand began selling online, and is now available nationwide at Target and Wholefoods, and specialty boutiques.

The crisis that took Bobbie from startup to household staple

Bobbie had a gift in the shape of a crisis: In 2022, a recall of baby formula from major formula supplier Abbott Nutrition, sparked a nationwide formula shortage, forcing parents to turn to desperate measures like buying formula for $120 a can on eBay.

Retailers like CVS and Walmart blamed brands for formula being out of stock. Brands like Enfamil and Similac claimed retailers weren’t distributing their formula deliveries. Bobbie got to work.

When Bobbie's growth team saw their customer count double in the first week of the recall, they knew they wouldn’t be able to provide their existing customers with enough formula. Bobbie closed sales to new customers and prioritized existing subscribers to guarantee they'd receive formula.

This was a make-or-break moment for Bobbie. The choice to put customers first and build trust in the brand was without a doubt the one that propelled Bobbie from startup to trusted household brand overnight.

Brand strategy 🎯

How did they do it? Bobbie’s brand strategy is all about trust.

Like any company with a strong brand, Bobbie deeply understand their audience. Buying food for your baby is incredibly high stakes - not only practically but emotionally. There’s stigma around not being able to breastfeed. It’s a highly regulated industry (as it should be). And on top of that, there is now (thanks to the 2022 shortage) parents worry about running out of formula. Yeesh. The last thing parents need is another choice to make - they need to be confident in the choices they were making. That confidence is what Bobbie's brand strategy provides.

Bobbie positions formula as food, with a product that’s better-for-you, reliably available, and by parents, for parents. Let’s look at how those pillars support the positioning.

1️⃣ Better-for-you

Bobbie is a better-for-you product (marketing speak for healthier, like honey-sweetened products). In Bobbie’s case, this means no palm oil, corn syrup, maltodextrin or alternative sugars. This is where third party certifications are useful to borrow trust as you're building a brand. When you’re building trust, especially as a new brand, sometimes you need to borrow from others to build that trust. In Bobbie’s case, this comparison page is a great example of building trust by securing certifications and awards from third parties like: 

• Wirecutter

• Today’s Parent

• Good Housekeeping

• Babylist

• Clean Label Project

2️⃣ When you subscribe to Bobbie, Bobbie subscribes to you

Bobbie’s second pillar is about reliability. When parents subscribe to Bobbie, Bobbie sets aside the formula they'll need until their child’s first birthday, guaranteeing that subscribers won’t risk shortages or outages. Of course parents can pause, edit or cancel your subscription, but they don’t ever have to worry about not being able to access the formula they need. Powerful - especially in light of the 2022 formula crisis.

3️⃣ By parents, for parents

Bobbie’s third pillar is caring about what their audience care about (and let’s not pretend that parents care about ‘fueling their baby’s wonder’ or some vague nonsense). What does it mean to be for parents in the formula category? For Bobbie, that looks like busting the shame of combo feeding (supplementing with formula) or using formula. They’ve done that beautifully, highlighting different feeding journeys that include formula. Their spokespeople include supermodel Ashley Graham, Queer Eye’s Tan France, award winning journalist Elaine Welteroth and tennis star Naomi Osaka. So smart. Beyond this, Bobbie have launched a policy and advocacy arm called Bobbie for Change, pushing for policies like paid parental leave and leading a movement of parents for change.

Brand marketing moves 💃

Bobbie’s growth has been brand-led from the beginning: prioritizing content, community, and commerce, in that order. Most DTC companies, Modi argues, prioritize commerce first. Bobbie’s hypothesis was that if they win on content, the sales will follow. Here’s how they do that:

• Educational content. Five years ago Bobbie launched a blog called Milk Drunk which publishes educational content. Today that blog has grown into a massive content play, including a podcast and vlog which acts as an advertorial for Bobbie and fills the knowledge gap around feeding.

• Bobbie for Change. Bobbie For Change is Bobbie’s social impact and policy arm, on a mission to “change the way America thinks about, talks about and actually nourishes our babies.” The site houses the organization’s campaigns, like this one inviting parents to write to their senators to demand paid parental leave.They also introduced the Infant Formula Made in America Act in Congress in 2024, which would be the first piece of tangible legislation that, if passed, “will help prevent future infant formula shortages by incentivizing new domestic players, fortifying the U.S. infant formula industry and ensuring that if one player goes down, the entire industry does not collapse overnight.”

• Parents Push Harder campaign, the brand’s first major TV campaign, featuring tennis star Naomi Osaka, a call to arms to push for paid parental leave in America. 84% of Americans support federal paid leave, and yet 73% of private sector employees don’t have it. Alongside the campaign, Bobbie launched actions like the Naomi Osaka Support Grant program, which provides cash grants for up to 50 families for interim support while advocating for federal paid leave.

What can we learn from Bobbie? 👶

• Have something to say - and back it with action. There are a lot of brands out there who have nothing to say, and they insist on saying it loudly. Bobbie have a perspective that reflects what their audience care about, and don’t shy away from talking about real issues like shame, parental leave, and judgement. Then they back it up with the stories they tell, the spokespeople they select, and the actions they invest in.

• Never waste a crisis.  I can’t overstate this enough. If crises are where you see what people are made of, they’re also where you how an organization thinks about and values brand. It would have been easy for Bobbie to make a cash grab in 2022 and gobble up sales - but they would have been selling out their existing customers.

• People will back your brand, when your brand backs its people. One of the signals of a strong brand is people being willing to stand behind it. It’s clear when you look at Bobbie’s social media and their campaigns that their employees, customers and investors believe in what they’re doing. People are willing to back your brand, when your brand is willing to back people. Just look at Bobbie’s investor list, the talent they’re able to attract for their ads, and the pride their team take in publicly sharing their work.

Couldn’t love this brand more, and I’m not even a mom. What do you think?

Happy weekend.

Amanda ✌️

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