$20m in sales with no funding: How a Singapore baby ecommerce brand did it

How does a fully bootstrapped business focused on baby products grow a US$23,000 personal investment into US$20 million in sales in just four years?

For Ivan Ong and Jane Neo, the husband-and-wife team behind Singapore-based KeaBabies, what it took was a little industry experience in a foreign market, empathy with their US-based customers’ deeply felt needs, and a global “pandemic bump” for online retail.

KeaBabies founders Ivan Ong and Jane Neo with their kids / Photo credit: KeaBabies

Ong and Neo’s ecommerce startup was born alongside their second baby, so to speak. They were “going through many ups and downs” as parents, so they chose a business that’s “close to the heart,” Neo recalls. “I wanted to add value to other people’s lives by sharing my authentic learning experience.”

KeaBabies primarily sells maternity and babycare products to the US. The startup also benefited from being in the right place at the right time.

“We were riding the ecommerce wave,” Ong tells Tech in Asia. “Coupled with the current Covid situation, it has accelerated growth for us.”

Today, the couple runs a 40-person operation that logs 4,000 orders a day. Ong and Neo are projecting US$25 million in annual revenue for 2021, a continuation of the double-digit growth KeaBabies enjoyed last year.

DIY growth

Self-funding allowed the entrepreneurs to have the last say over their business strategy and execution without answering to outside investors.

“We invested S$30,000 (US$22,650) in the beginning. Eventually, as we started to see success, we also increased our capital to S$1 million (US$755,000),” Ong shares. They injected the funding in tranches, sourced from previous profits and the couple’s own kitty.

“We don’t have any debt, we don’t have any loans, we don’t have any investors. We just [grew the business] organically.” KeaBabies began turning in a profit by the sixth month of its operations.

Photo credit: KeaBabies

The startup’s performance has drawn interest from potential buyers, but Ong and Neo have shown them the door. “We have received a lot of inquiries about selling our brand,” Ong says. “Right now there’s a hype, whereby many investors are buying FBA (fulfillment by Amazon) businesses. We rejected all of them.”

For now, the pair see no upside to selling their highly profitable business or ceding any leverage to outside investors. “We don’t have to be pressured into developing products that actually won’t make the cut,” Neo explains. “Also, we don’t have to worry about the margin as we can dictate it ourselves. We don’t have to answer to anybody.”

Fierce competition

Boost from Amazon

Gloves-off tactics

The Covid-19 effect

Expansion and future plans