Q4 Featured Founder | BabyQuip

The 3rd New Majority founder currently fundraising from YOU this quarter.

Hello New Majority Investors! 🌞

Before diving into BabyQuip, here are a few updates on past featured founders:

• 🛒💚 The Sun and Swell round is still open and closes on November 7th!

• 🚽🌟 Throne successfully closed out their round in October with $3,132,760 raised from 657 investors. 

• 🍽️🌍 Akua successfully closed out their round on October 17th with $285,966 raised from 503 investors. 

• ☠️⚰️ Recompose, the human-composting death care company, was voted best funeral home in the Pacific North West!

BabyQuip

Transforming family travel since 2016, BabyQuip provides traveling families with a hassle-free way to access essential baby equipment. With BabyQuip, families can truly experience stress-free family travel! 🛫👶

First, some context:

• 🚗🛫 Traveling with kids is a joy and worth the memories, but it can get very complicated, very fast.

• 👶 Imagine traveling with your newborn or your 2 toddlers under 5 without lugging around the stroller, portable crib, baby carrier, and more.

• 🌎 Operating in 1,200+ locations in the US, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, and more, BabyQuip provides rental baby equipment to traveling families.

• 🧸 The platform connects traveling parents with local parents who rent out gear including car seats, cribs, strollers, and toys.

• ✅ You can arrange to pick up your rental gear yourself and return it hassle-free.

This company is made for you if:

• 👶 You travel with babies (or you want to travel with your baby!)

• 🌎 Babies are expensive, so you want to rent baby gear, reduce overconsumption, and promote sustainability!

• 💯 You value extending the quality and life cycle of baby gear. 

Tell me more

BabyQuip is transforming vacations, making them more accessible for families with young children. The platform boasts a community of over 1,700 Quality Providers (QPs) offering a diverse selection of baby essentials, addressing a significant and previously unmet need for families looking to travel with young children. 👶🛫🌎

Convinced? Invest today in BabyQuip.

More details below.

The details

• Industry: 🚗🛫Rental and Leasing Services, Travel, SaaS

• Impact: BabyQuip promotes healthy lives and well-being for all (SDG 3) and tackles gender equality (SDG 5).

• Team Diversity: Latina Woman Founder

• HQ: Beautiful New Mexico 🌄

• Company size: 11-50

• Year founded: 2016

• Key investors: 🏦🔒 BabyQuip raised $3.5M in early 2022 and is backed by $8.5M in funding from notable investors like How Women Invest, Thorney & more.

  • How Women Invest is a venture capital firm that leverages its professional network of 14,000 women to identify and support female founders.

  • Thorney is a prominent private investment group that takes an active role in companies they have invested in.

• Investment type: Preferred Stock*

  • *A Preferred Stock is a share of a company (stock), but it has added protections compared to common stock. For example, preferred stockholders get priority for receiving dividends, resulting in more consistent dividend payments. 

  • Price per share: $1.07

  • Valuation: $29.73 M 

  • Investor Perks: Your $500 investment in BabyQuip comes with a donation of $30 to your choice of charity (Feeding America, a nonprofit focused on solving child hunger, or Unbound, a nonprofit on a mission to support families living in poverty)!

  • BabyQuip is conducting crowdfunding alongside their ongoing fundraising round, and ensuring investors in both rounds enjoy identical terms at $1.07 per share.

• Deadline: December 12, 2023

• Amount Invested: $909,438.32

• Number of Investors: 702 

• Goal: $15k- $2.31M

• Min investment: $249.31 (233 shares)

• Early traction:

  • 🏦🔒BabyQuip is growing fast! Their GMV (gross merchandise volume) is currently $12.1M and it doubled from 2019 to 2020 and more than tripled from 2020 to 2021. In 2022, they had 118% revenue growth.

    • *Gross merchandise value (GMV) refers to the value of goods sold and is calculated prior to the deduction of any fees or expenses.

  • 📲BabyQuip launched its first mobile app in December 2022 and already has more than 60,000 downloads. 

  • 🌟To date, BabyQuip has over 7,000 affiliate partnerships with property managers, travel agents, hotels, and vacation rental companies.

  • 🚨Among BabyQuip’s notable press includes features in Forbes and the Insider.

Founding team

• Fran Maier: CEO, Chairman of the Board, and acting CFO, Fran is best known for her 10+ years leading TRUSTe (now Trust Arc), the leading privacy trustmark and solutions provider. She also was the Co-Founder and first General Manager of Match.com, the earliest and most successful dating platform. She has been active as an advisor to start-ups, many led by female entrepreneurs, as well as an angel investor. Fran is a graduate of Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

• BabyQuips core team is largely composed of women, POC, and former BabyQuip Quality Providers that are incredibly passionate about the mission.

Due diligence

Pros:

• ☝️⚙️ BabyQuip is the sole U.S. based baby gear rental brand extending its services to the international arena. 

• 🇺🇸 The U.S. family travel market is vast, with 77.5 million families expending up to $150 billion annually on travel-related services. BabyQuip has 8 times more website traffic than competitors in the U.S.

• 📈 The company has served over 175,000 orders (60,000 in 2022 alone) with 99% of customer feedback expressing high satisfaction (5 stars).

• 🌟 83% of customers refer others to the service, lending to strong customer loyalty and low customer acquisition costs.

• 🦺 Safety is prioritized above all else. In addition to extensive insurance coverage that they’ve never had to use, they also offer free car seat replacements to any QP whose car seat has been in an accident regardless of whether it happened during a rental through BabyQuip.

• 🙋 BabyQuip is a two-sided platform for parents and entrepreneurs looking to launch their own businesses, and has a thriving Facebook group of dedicated QPs. This business model is similar to Airbnb’s model in which hosts make money, and customers save money!

Potential risks:

• 🚦High demand during peak travel seasons might lead to limited availability or last-minute cancellations.

• 🤨 There's a risk that the rented gear may not be compatible with your child's specific needs or your preferred travel destinations.

Competitors

• Traveling Baby Company: Offers a wide variety of baby equipment to rent, including full-size cribs, car seats, strollers, high chairs, humidifiers, and more. Beach items are also available for rent. 

• Rents4Baby: Offers a wide variety of luxury baby gear available for rent for a minimum of three days to several months.

Why BabyQuip: BabyQuip has a track record of successful investment raises and large potential for scalability and sustained growth, demonstrated by their $3.4M in gross revenue in 2022. They are changing the face of family travel by offering an extensive range of baby gear products from full-sized cribs, to strollers, car seats, toys, and more. BabyQuip releases the burden of cumbersome equipment, allowing families to focus on enjoying travel and making unforgettable memories. 🚼🌎

Convinced? Invest today in BabyQuip.