BabyQuip Founder Fran Maier on Making Travel Easy for Parents

BabyQuip is the world’s leading baby gear rental service, delivering clean, quality baby gear items – from car seats to strollers and more – to families who don’t want to haul bulky gear while traveling. We save the family vacation!

BabyQuip Cleaning offers exceptional baby gear cleaning services for local families and businesses, particularly for car seats, strollers, and high chairs.

As a managed marketplace, the BabyQuip platform enables its community of more than 850 independent contractors, called quality providers, the opportunity to build a business renting and cleaning baby gear on the BabyQuip platform. Mostly moms, the quality providers benefit from an active and supportive community, ongoing training, and leads generated from both online advertising and through strategic partnerships.

In early 2012, I left my last position (at the time president and chair of TRUSTe, now TrustArc) and bought a three-story home in the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco. As it happens, it was in Airbnb’s neighborhood, and everyone was talking about it. Before long, I was renting two rooms on the third floor of my home on Airbnb. I quickly realized that this could be a great money-maker and give me the time to think about what I wanted to do next.  

Because of my vacation rental side hustle as well as the emerging ride-sharing businesses, I  began to think about how travel and work (gig economy!) are changing. Change is always a great catalyst for new companies. What new companies could emerge and take advantage of these changes?

I came across a baby gear rental business, and it clicked for me almost immediately. I remember how difficult it was to travel with my sons when they were small. I’ve seen how difficult it is at airports. And as a vacation rental host, I didn’t have the gear families needed (nor did I want to buy and store it). 

We formed the company in May 2016.

Not surprisingly, my team is mostly women and completely remote. Up until now, we’ve been a small team of eight. The lone guy is Joe, our CTO, who is also my son. He joined up in 2017 after spending five years doing tech at Accenture. It’s a rare thing to see a mother/son team, and we really enjoyed appearing on Shark Tank together (March 2020). Four of our team members, including Director of Lead Gen and Recruitment Nicole Kitzman, started out as quality providers, which really helps because they know the ins and outs of the service. I recently recruited Patricia Johnson, formerly of Virtuoso and Visa, as vice president of business development. She’ll be focused on driving more partnerships.

As I looked at the competitive landscape back in 2016, I didn’t see any national brands or any company trying to do this at scale. BabyQuip’s really built the category.

There is no other national brand doing this. There are a few regional brands, some that have been around since the ’90s, that offer baby gear rental and lots of mom ’n’ pops, especially in large family destination markets.    

At this point, we have several advantages. Some investors like to call them moats:

• A trusted national brand that can serve families wherever they go (within the US and Canada).
• Product-market fit, as evidenced by a Net Promoter Score over 90.
• A strong community of more than 850 quality providers across the US and Canada. 
• Trust and safety program, including liability insurance that protects the company and our quality providers. This is expensive and hard to get.
• Strategic partnerships with national brands – most recently our host referral program on VRBO, where we’ve signed up more than 1500 VRBO hosts to introduce BabyQuip to their guests.  
• SEO and social media dominance, with more than 30,000 followers and a robust influencer program.
• Sophisticated technology that serves our travel rental and cleaning customers, our quality providers, and partnerships. It is quite complex to keep track of each quality provider’s inventory (multiple cribs, car seats, strollers, and more), dates available, etc.  

In addition to building awareness of the category and BabyQuip, we plan to expand into new markets. We’re especially looking to those that Americans are traveling to, such as the Caribbean and Mexico, and potentially to other markets with similar dynamics. In addition, we are focused on building more strategic partnerships. We also have a number of new service opportunities, such as PetQuip (delivering pet gear to traveling families) and SafeQuip (baby-proofing homes), among others that we’d like to evaluate and launch.

We are building a trusted brand to address a very large market of traveling families.  Our approach is right for these times in that millennial parents want to travel with their children, value experiences, are comfortable with marketplace and gig economy services, expect clean and safe services, and appreciate the sustainability aspects of what we do. We will continue to build “deep moats” and maintain our leadership position.

I’d also point out that we survived the pandemic. In April 2020, we had virtually no orders, but by July 2021, we had more than 4,000. That’s quite a turnaround! Families will want to travel again, and we’ll be there for them.

This is my fifth startup, and I’ve benefited from an extensive network of investors and others, so I’ve been able to raise the needed capital. When we started Match.com back in the mid ’90’s, there was no support for women entrepreneurs. Now, there is much more of a commitment to back women as well as more women writing checks. Significant investors and advisors include How Women Invest, Theresia Gouw, Jillian Manus, Jan Brandt, Barbara Clarke, Randi Zuckerberg, Anna Zornosa, and Heather Morris, each of whom have built brands and companies.  

As for advice for women founders, the number one thing I’ll share is to have confidence. You know your market, and you know your solution. Believe that you can do what you are setting out to do. From a more tactical standpoint, build out your network, try to show traction faster, consider an accelerator, and persevere.

I believe our foundation of a trusted brand will give us the ability to expand and succeed in a number of different categories, but for the near term, we are focused on bringing our service to families everywhere. I would not be surprised if we are eventually bought by a travel company, a big-box retailer, or another marketplace down the road.