The Motherhood Market Is Growing Up (Finally).
Images: Talm, SKN TO SKN, Artipoppe, Mother Euro, Mumma Milla, Mother.FM, Ilouity,
In our Start-Up Mothers piece, we explored a truth that’s becoming harder to ignore, and thank goodness for that: motherhood and ambition aren’t opposing forces. For many women, motherhood is the catalyst, the moment that turns frustration into clarity, and clarity into a business. So many founders I’ve spoken to have echoed some version of this. I’ve felt it too. In an interview last summer, I said: “Motherhood isn’t an interruption to ambition. It can be its greatest refinement.”
This is the natural next chapter. Because if motherhood can be fuel for entrepreneurship, then the maternal economy: preconception and TTC, pregnancy, postpartum, and early parenthood is the most obvious place to see what happens when founder-mothers build. And what’s happening is bigger than a trend in “mama care.”
Motherhood is finally being treated like what it actually is: a lifecycle economy, not a nine-month moment, with real purchasing power, recurring needs, and founders building the infrastructure the market ignored for too long. It’s no longer a niche corner of the consumer landscape and investors are starting to pay attention.
By Alice Codford
The New Maternal Standard
For decades, maternal categories were built like an afterthought: often clinical, uninspiring, and often vague in the exact places mothers need certainty. Founder-mothers are changing the standard by designing around three non-negotiables: proof, dignity, and function.
Proof is showing up most clearly in skincare, because in maternal life stages the question isn’t only “Does it work?”, it’s “Is it safe right now?” Brands like SKN TO SKN are part of this shift, positioning themselves as TTC, pregnancy, and postpartum-safe skincare so women aren’t left doing ingredient investigations during the most physically and emotionally demanding seasons of their lives. That proposition is landing at scale: Boots stocks SKN TO SKN, and the brand has shared that it has sold out of multiple products on Boots.com and in-store. When Boots backs a maternal skincare line and it sells through, the market has officially moved.
Talm sits in a similar trust-first lane, but with a different kind of credibility marker: the brand took a minority investment from Mathilde and Bertrand Thomas, the founders of Caudalie, a meaningful vote of confidence from one of Europe’s most established skincare founder duos.
Images: SKN TO SKN & Talm
Dignity is what happens when maternity stops being synonymous with compromise. Ariane Goldman, founder of HATCH, once summed up the old cultural mood perfectly: “nobody would even write about maternity clothes because it was taboo to be gaining weight and seeing your body change.” That stigma shaped the market for years, not just what existed, but how little effort brands put into making women feel like themselves while pregnant. HATCH helped shift that, building a wardrobe that treats maternity and postpartum as a continuation of identity, not a detour.
And denim, historically the hardest category to “do maternity” well, is now being rebuilt with real intention. Ilouity was started by two founders during their maternity leave after they couldn’t find jeans that felt both genuinely cool and genuinely comfortable. The result is the kind of maternity denim that now shows up on “best maternity jeans” round-ups, the places stylish mothers actually look before they buy.
Images: Ilouity & HATCH
Function is the quiet revolution. Not the glossy “self-care” version, the real one: leaks, recovery, overstimulation, the 3am reality nobody has time to romanticise. That’s why products like Mumma Milla’s leakproof nursing bras matter. They’re not romanticising motherhood, they’re making it easier by solving a real problem. They’ve even had a celebrity stamp of approval: Sienna Miller, who is currently expecting her third child, has been photographed wearing Mumma Milla’s leakproof bandeau nursing bralette, a small but telling indicator of how mainstream (and style-conscious) this “function-first” shift has become.
And then there’s babywearing, one of the most functional categories of early motherhood, being reinvented as culture. Artipoppe has essentially redesigned the baby carrier into a cult item: its Zeitgeist carrier has been described as the “Birkin of mom gear,” turning hands-free practicality into something that also signals identity. It’s a marker of where the maternal market is heading: function is table stakes now. The flex is function with taste.
Images: Artipoppe & Mumma Milla
The “Village as Product” Era
Here’s where the maternal economy gets even more interesting: some of the most meaningful businesses in this space aren’t physical products at all.
They’re infrastructure.
Because what modern mothers are often missing isn’t a better moisturiser or a cuter bra. It’s the thing generations before had by default: community, support, regulation, and reassurance. The village didn’t disappear because mothers stopped needing it, it disappeared because modern life made it harder to access. And founder-mothers are building what they couldn’t find.
Mother.fm is a perfect example of the new kind of maternal business: an emotional utility. Audio meditations and affirmations for motherhood that meet women where they actually are: time-poor, depleted, overstimulated, offering support that doesn’t require another “routine” to maintain. It’s designed for the season where you don’t need a wellness plan; you need a lifeline you can press play on.
Then there’s community-as-product, which is arguably the most undervalued category in the entire maternal economy. Mother Euro is a sharp example of this: a community for expat mothers in Europe. Women building a life and raising children far from home, often without family nearby, often navigating new systems, languages, and cultures while also doing the raw work of early motherhood. It’s not just “a group.” It’s a modern answer to a modern problem.
This is what it looks like when motherhood becomes a catalyst not only for products, but for systems. These businesses aren’t just reacting to consumer demand, they’re filling gaps left by culture and community.
Images: Mother Euro & Mother FM
From “Mum Brands” to a Lifecycle Economy: Why Investors Are Paying Attention
When you zoom out, the brands emerging across TTC, pregnancy, postpartum, and early parenthood aren’t simply “mum brands.” They’re building across a set of life stages that are high-frequency, emotionally charged, and deeply influential in how households spend and choose.
And that’s exactly why this category is no longer niche.
The maternal economy has all the signals investors like: repeatable needs, strong word-of-mouth, high trust premiums, and long-term customer relationships, not to mention the reality that pregnancy often acts as the gateway into years of purchasing decisions. But what makes this moment feel different is how the category is evolving: it’s not just more products; it’s better products, built with a higher bar for proof, design, and functionality and increasingly, with community baked in.
Still, there’s a question worth naming as this space grows: Are we building a world where mothers are more supported or just more efficiently sold to?
The brands that last won’t simply market “care.” They’ll reduce mental load. They’ll build trust without fear-mongering. They’ll strengthen belonging, not just engagement. They’ll respect mothers as whole people, with taste, intelligence, ambition, and needs that don’t fit neatly into a nine-month window.
Because when mothers build, they don’t just build businesses. They build what the world told them to go without and in doing so, they change the category, the culture, and the story of motherhood itself.
