New parents are learned about product sustainability and green washing before they make their baby registry. Parents want to what is best for their child, and that includes the long-term effects of climate change.
They are also willing to spend more money on items that will last longer—such as better quality clothes or furniture made with sustainable materials.
It is important to remember that not every parent is the same, and that some may not be able or willing to purchase green products. However, the evidence suggests that parents are more likely to be concerned about their children's environment and future.
So what does this mean for businesses?
The answer is two-fold—firstly, there is a growing market for sustainable baby products. And secondly, businesses need to be transparent about the sustainability of their products in order to gain the trust of parents.
And one sustainable business model that has been doing well the past years is baby stroller as a service, a branch of the many baby equipment-as-a-service popping up everywhere. This means that product-as-a-service is a growing trend among young parents who see the value propositions of renting instead buying products for their kids.
About StrollMe
Industry: B2C
Founding year: 2020
Branche: Baby goods rentals
Products available on a rental/subscription bases: baby strollers, baby bikes, accessories
Founders: Sebastian Reichelt and Timon Beutel
Headquarters: Munich
Subscription management software: circuly
Business Model of StrollMe
Babies need a lot of gear - from strollers and bikes to clothes and toys. These items can burn a hole through your wallet considering the speed at which babies grow and outgrow most things bought for them. It can quickly go from, “OMG, he looks so cute in that baby stroller with all his toys going on a ride with him” to “he barely fits in the stroller. Where are we going to put all his toys?”
“In your handbag honey! Of course!”
Luckily some people out there realized that buying things like strollers, baby chairs, or baby car seats is an expensive affair. And on top of that when babies outgrow them, the stuff does nothing but take up space in a lonely corner.
Timon and Sebastian (founders of StrollMe) also realized that when they became fathers. Timon and Sebastian (full time founders and full time parents) believe in leaving behind a world worth living in for their children by making their own ecological footprint as small as possible. They rent out baby strollers that can be reused, refurbished and eventually recycled into new strollers.
"We want to be part of a movement. We want to bring this movement into your everyday life with your child. To bring awareness that we need to start making a change for that very child. To use our resources smarter.”
Tools used by StrollMe
Refer to the infographic below to see the tools used by StrollMe.
The Challenge Faced by a Baby Goods Rental Company
StrollMe, with it’s headless e-commerce store wanted to offer more flexibility and options to their customers by enabling buy and rent options in the same checkout flow. They also wanted to track their revenue per product and customer better and make the process of renting as automatic as possible.
How do you describe your situation before using circuly?
“A bit of a mess. We didn’t have a clear overview of our subscriptions and the assets that are currently with the customers”
The Solution
circuly offered StrollMe a customized checkout page where their customers can rent strollers, buy additional accessories and continue to the payment page with both rented and bought products in the same checkout flow. For revenue tracking the circuly platform provides StrollMe a visual solution where they can track revenue per product and customer and plan better.
The Benefit
The flexibility offered by circuly in terms of customization helped StrollMe tap new customer segments and build a closer relationship with their customers. Open and transparent communication between circuly and StrollMe enabled them to react efficiently to new use cases that came up due to their growth in the baby goods rental industry.
“We had a long list of features for our subscription business and found what we were looking for at circuly. circuly works perfectly with our headless Shopify architecture and enables us to concentrate on our customers.”
In 2020 StrollMe launched it’s baby stroller subscription e-commerce webshop. The concept of offering something like baby strollers and baby goods on a subscription basis was well received among the customers. The vision that they had (leaving a better world for their own kids) resonated with their customers but in order to ensure smooth operations and provide a seamless customer experience, StrollMe had to tame its rental operations. Doing that meant finding solutions of typical rental problems like automating payments, tracking revenue flow,
circuly provided the necessary support, with its subscription management software, to StrollMe and ensured growth.
StrollMe is now set on a growth path as both awareness and demand about products as a subscription increases. Their aim now is to be able to do everything is circuly and let circuly concentrate on the operations while they concentrate on bringing more customers in.
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