Started in 2015 by Naiyya Saggi, BabyChakra is a parenting platform in India for pregnancy and childcare for resources and information on modern day parenting and early childhood development. The social discovery platform has tread quite a bit, with having an user base of more than 4 million, as it’s grown from a website in just one language to an app in 6 different vernacular languages. Naiyya Saggi, Founder of Baby Chakra, gives a detailed round-up about the brand, its reach, the various campaigns they organize and the future plans in a detailed interaction with Mommy & Baby Times.
July 22, 2019
BabyChakra is a unique social discovery platform that has its users as the beating heart and at the fulcrum, as it provides first hand support from Doctors and Experts through free live video chats and community conversations. The Mumbai-based brand offers pregnancy-related tips and parenting advice, and acts as a forum for parents to interact and exchange insights about pregnancy and parenting. It churns out more than 1 lakh user generated content every month. The plethora of the content includes personalised expert vetted day to day baby growth and development tips, and information covering every granular aspect of pregnancy and parenting.
Making new strides with the Digital-First Approach
Inception of BabyChakra dates back to 2015, when Naiyya Saggi, founder of BabyChakra felt the need to leverage technology to make decisions around parenting easier. Since then the platform has evolved with more than 4 million users, growing from a website in just one language to a full fledged app in 6 different vernacular languages, on IOS and Android. In the course of its business journey, the company has associated itself with more than 80 brands, 1600 plus Doctors and Experts in various categories. It has also established a strong ecommerce platform with 35000+ products and local services in various health, wellness and lifestyle categories catering to mother care and baby care segments. This unique integration of content, community and commerce makes BabyChakra a one-stop destination at fingertips typically for nuclear families.
About the tremendous surge and growth in the baby care segment in India, Naiyya Saggi asserts “the baby care segment in India is as big as USD 40 billion, highly fragmented and growing exponentially. This is one market that has never been impacted by recession. Besides, with incomes rising and increasing awareness about baby care, we are witnessing massive growth in small towns, too”.
“BabyChakra is a great and significant platform in terms of providing first hand support from Doctors and Experts… our doctor interaction programs are one of our key attributes in building user trust and touching lives”
Key assets and strengths
Outlining the key strengths and what has worked primarily for BabyChakra, she says “our biggest strength is our ability to help our 2.5 million plus user community to have the best of parenting and pregnancy guidance driven by our AI algorithms that makes the experience completely contextual and personalized. BabyChakra is a great and significant platform in terms of providing first hand support from Doctors and Experts through free live video chats and community conversations.”
The company receives receive 500 + questions from parents across 30 cities of India across multiple languages BabyChakra is available in. About the interactions with the user community, she says “our doctor interaction programs are one of our key attributes in building user trust and touching lives since they understand and address the challenges of parents in India very well. More than 1000 doctors are sharing their experience and opinions on BabyChakra, helping reduce anxiety and distrust of 2 million parents monthly across our web app and social properties.”
Collaborations with different brands
BabyChakra has associated with 80 plus top Indian and International brands like Johnson & Johnson, FlipKart, Himalaya Wellness, Fisher Price, FabIndia, P&G across different segments like mother and baby care, healthcare and FMCG.
About the various collaborations and alliances, she affirms “this has contributed towards creating an ecosystem that caters to every want and need of a parent at fingertips. BabyChakra has successfully collaborated and launched multiple International brands like OkBaby, Tinytwig, Sophie la girafe and Beaba in Indian market. These collaborations have built a strong community of mothers and influencers who in turn make a robust integrated system that works towards building a brand loyalty.”
She further adds “through our brand collaborations like JBCN School, HDFC Life, Zandu, MumMumCo and Tata Health our brand live chats have reached millions of families guiding them with multiple parenting challenges and touching their lives on a day to day basis. BabyChakra brings brands, products, services together with moms, both online & offline allowing true engagements. We enable brands to speak to their end users across assets on the app and also offline.”
While baby care offline market may still hold a larger presence in India, the online market is doubling up in sales with every passing year. BabyChakra has a big share of its presence in the online market for the baby and mother care categories. Its inventory hosts more than 35000+ products from more than 450 brands and 1500+ local services. Their marketplace model and strategies has helped address needs of the small town markets that do not have access to or knowledge of good emerging products, brands and services.
“BabyChakra has associated with 80 plus top Indian and International brands… across different segments like mother and baby care, healthcare and FMCG… Its inventory hosts more than 35000+ products from more than 450 brands and 1500+ local services.”
On various campaigns around the idea of Parenting
The parenting platform pushes the envelope further in terms of sensitizing and inculcating strong awareness that touches nearly every aspect of parenting, by organizing a host of various campaigns. About the different campaigns, Saggi maintains “our unique campaigns like #EqualParenting for Father’s Day made its way through 25 plus corporate offices, 5000 plus corporate dads, 2 million plus community users and millions of parents across nation bringing a revolution in the world of emerging modern day parenting. Our awareness campaigns like Breast is Best reached 3 million users and made an impactful contribution towards creating a sense of awareness about breast feeding and its benefits. BabyChakra is celebrating Doctor’s day this month, with a massive outreach to its users and collaborated doctors. With a #CareHeroes campaign, we plan to invite stories from our users about how their doctors have been their heroes. We are also doing deeper offline outreach with 150+ doctors to give away exclusive hampers for their patients.”
Go forward path
With a social media follower base of close to 7 lakh and content reaching more than 6 lakh users per week, BabyChakra is striving to grow across all dimensions exponentially by three folds by end of 2019. As for the factors to facilitate the growth, she shares “to support these projections, the brand plans to bring on board advanced technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing to help reach out to more parents in a highly personalised way.”
Pointing to the new developments in the pipeline, she says “the next few months are packed with The BabyChakra Summit, a 4 city 2000 parent’s event bringing together Brands, Doctors, service providers and Corporate organizations on the same forum engaging with each other.”
