Top Baby Trends of 2023

As birth rates decline, hand-me-down clothing is becoming less relevant. The cost of baby clothes and toys can less and less be spread across multiple children, making them essentially more expensive.

In fact, the global fertility rate has fallen drastically from 5.1 children per woman in 1964 to 2.4 children per woman in 2018, per the World Bank.

As effective costs have risen, a growing number of communities have established what are called toy libraries, where parents can check out toys – just like books. There’s also a parallel surge in demand for toy rental. One of the top Google autocomplete suggestions for Montessori toys (one of the most expensive types) is “Montessori toy rental”.

In parallel, second-hand marketplaces for all things baby & toddler have sprung up, like Goodbuygear, which has grown over 250% in popularity over the past year.

First-time parents have a world of unknowns ahead of them — which presents a lucrative opportunity for Babylist, an online platform that's now the third-largest baby registry in the U.S., behind only Amazon and Target.

The company allows users add items from all over the web to their registries, including things that can't be bought in stores, such as diaper subscriptions and housekeeping services. (A cash funds option also gives friends and family the chance to contribute to bigger expenses such as child care or even life insurance.)

A new parent's first birth is one of the times they are most likely to switch to a new brand. Whichever brand can predict the birth earliest then make moves to gain the consumer's trust, the better positioned they are to cash in on a lifetime relationship with the consumer.

Babylist is tapping into this segment of consumers that is generally both eager to plan — users spend a whopping 40 hours building their registries on average — and open to new brands and retailers, as they haven't yet developed loyalties.

Where the growth of e-commerce has hurt traditional brick-and-mortar chains — including bankrupt Babies 'R' Us, which once held the third-place spot — it has helped Babylist: As older consumers become more comfortable with shopping online, expectant parents don't feel like they're alienating older family members by choosing an internet-based registry.

Baby sensory videos owe their ascent, in part, to a change YouTube and Spotify made to their ranking algorithms which prioritizes the watch duration as a proxy for engagement, rather than just looking at likes and clicks. This gave an advantage to content where users typically press "play" and let the video play continuously without pausing or skipping forward.

This algorithm change also played a role in the ascent of lo-fi music, but the dynamics of baby sensory videos magnify the impact. With most other YouTube videos, the person who selects the video and the person who watches the video are the same. With baby sensory videos though, not only are they different, but the person watching the video – the baby – isn’t even able to pause or fast forward. This means that, in the eyes of YouTube’s engagement and ranking algorithm, a single view by a baby is worth more than one by an adult.

Screen time is an effective way to keep kids distracted for short periods of time, so parents often turn to YouTube for emergency entertainment. This demand, coupled with parenting guilt over mindless screentime, has led to interest in videos that offer some kinds of stimulating or educational elements. While it’s relatively easy to find videos for kids who are old enough to talk or count, it's historically been harder to find videos for babies. This has created a market for baby sensory videos, which use soothing music and brightly-colored shapes against dark backgrounds to keep small children occupied without worrying parents about what they'll see.

Sensory videos are related to the ASMR video trend, which targets adults with videos that include soothing and repetitive sounds. The availability of royalty-free music, and the ease of creating repetitive animations with simple shapes and bright colors, means it's relatively easy to produce videos in this format.

Nanit, which sells smart baby monitor products, has had a fascinating go-to-market strategy and a compelling long-term content marketing strategy.

The company’s growth has been driven by its ability to keep families connected. Over time, the distance that children settle down, away from their roots, has grown. And on top of this, the pandemic has accelerated this distance between family members for many demographics. In fact, grandparents, aunts, uncles and other relatives have recently made up 20% of Nanit’s active users. Parents can set permissions so that relatives can hear, see, and even talk with the baby no matter the distance.

Nanit’s marketing angle has shifted as it has grown it’s customer base. The early adopters were customers who wanted to more closely monitor and track their baby’s sleep - an extension of the Quantified Self movement exemplified by Fitbit and the Apple Watch, but applied to quantifying others instead.

Nanit then started going after consumers who didn’t want to miss their kids earliest moments and even wanted to share these moments with family. It’s a different use case, but utilizes the same underlying technology. This let them expand the market and, once they own it, they can help all their customers understand the value of the health and sleep data they are collecting, not just the early adopters.

Originally, baby monitoring was just a microphone that let parents hear if their baby was crying. But it wasn’t something parents would record and share, even if they technically could.

Nanit combines imagery and data to auto-generate special content like image reels celebrating the first time a baby smiles and timelapses of a baby’s growth. This turns Nanit into a content conveyor belt that, in addition to helping parents share more of their baby’s journey on social media, also serves as free and powerful marketing for the Nanit brand.

How do you sell a product when what you're really marketing is not buying a product?

Historically, the beauty industry has seen many of these, like “no-makeup makeup” and “skin fasting”— the movement toward taking a break from cosmetics and skincare products to help the body recover. Rather than lose revenue to these movements, the industry adapted: savvy brands leveraged the movements to build long-term goodwill with customers and encourage them to substitute for higher-priced, higher-margin products.

Solid Starts is a baby food company that has found a way around this same problem: the company believes parents should serve infants solid food as early as possible, with an emphasis on real foods like fruits and vegetables, but that means they don't have the same economics as a company like Gerber that can sell food products. Instead, Solid Starts offers parenting guides.

Their free content consists of a food database that essentially answers search queries related to “can babies eat x”. The free content is often enough to answer these one-off questions, and the site then tries to upsell visitors by offering them a guide with answers to their remaining questions. These types of questions don’t stop coming when they stop subsisting entirely on milk, formula, and applesauce, so Solid Starts has the opportunity to keep marketing new products to parents as they get older.

One reason this is happening now is the rise of mobile phones, and, in particular, of Googling-on-the-go and Googling at the kitchen table: questions about what's safe to feed to a baby often arise at home, but they can also show up when someone is at a restaurant.

And as parents try out a wider range of diets like paleo and plant-based, they often project their own dietary preferences onto their children.

As US birth rates drop for the seventh year in a row, the diaper market is shrinking, at least in terms of unit volume. But it's growing in revenue, as more companies go after the upscale segment of the market with higher prices.

Alongside this, the average family size is shrinking, and the median age of first-time moms has gone from 21 in 1970 to 26 in 2018, meaning that when people do have kids, they have higher incomes and a larger budget. Brands like Coterie are selling higher-priced diapers to capture this new and selective market.

Larger diaper brands have responded to these fundamental shifts in two ways: some are raising prices overall and some are selling tech-infused diapers that include features like a bluetooth-based alert system that tells caregivers when their baby needs to be changed. These haven’t been as popular as manufacturers expected though, as many parents comically point out that their babies already have built-in alert systems for when they need to be changed: crying.

Diapers are a huge business: the average family with small children spends $1K each year on them. But the big growth market in diapers is not diapers for infants, whose sales are fairly static as higher prices offset lower volumes instead. The real growth is in diapers for adults. In 2020, for the first time, there were more people over 65 than there were infants, and the gap is growing. In Japan, sales of adult diapers exceed sales of infant diapers, and the global market is worth some $9B. For adult diapers, one of the problems to be solved is that customers are embarrassed to buy them—some experts estimate that only half of the adults affected by weak bladders are buying diapers. This has made direct-to-consumer e-commerce a powerful channel: it expands the market for diapers by finally giving prospective customers a way to find out if they need them, and then get them, without telling anyone.