Chicago’s newest e-commerce startup wants new parents to put their babies in cardboard boxes.
Finnbin co-founder Catherine Merritt promises the idea isn’t as weird as it sounds.
“It’s a baby box company rooted in the tradition in Finland that goes back to the 1930s, when Finland was facing a huge crisis of infant mortality,” she said. “The government instituted this practice of giving new parents cardboard boxes that were full of newborn essentials.”
In 1930s Finland, many families lived in sparsely populated homes without a separate bed for the infant to sleep in. The lack of dedicated sleeping surfaces was believed to contribute to the country’s infant mortality crisis, because sharing a bed with a newborn has been found to increase the risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
The final baby essential in the Finnish newborn kit, therefore, was the box itself, which was padded and came with customized bedding that made it a cozy, safe place for the infant to sleep by him- or herself.
Although Finland has since become one of the world’s wealthiest countries, the tradition of giving boxes to parents of newborn babies has persisted. Now Finnbin wants to popularize the starter kit concept in the United States.
“Right now, if you go onto baby sites and look at all the things out there, they’re so advanced and so technical that I think there’s something kind of perfect about getting back to a more basic approach,” said Merritt.
The box comes with around 45 items, ranging from baby clothes and bottles to nursing pads and condoms for parents. It also contains informational pamphlets about children’s health and safe sleeping habits developed by a Chicago nonprofit that works with pediatric health issues.
All items are designed to be gender-neutral, at least for now. The box costs $450, which Merritt said makes it an affordable starter kit for first-timers.
“We’re really looking at younger parents,” said Merritt. “We really see this as an opportunity to leverage the registry and the baby shower space, and to make sure it becomes one of those must-have items.”
Merritt previously founded MUMZY, a crowdfunding company for entrepreneurial moms that was acquired earlier this year. Her co-founder, Shawn Bercuson, is a Chicago tech veteran who joined Groupon in its founding year, eventually serving as VP of business development before leaving to become an investor and serial entrepreneur.
Merritt said Finnbin was Bercuson’s idea.
“He had started to really look into it because his wife was pregnant,” said Merritt. “He thought it was such a wonderful idea that it should exist here. He started looking into it, and by the time we were introduced he had started to find partners and brands to figure out what should go into the box.”
Merritt, who is a mother of two, said the idea appealed to her because she could still remember the stress of figuring out what she needed to buy before having her first child.
“There was this moment when we hadn’t really gotten anything, we were at the doctor’s, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be put on bed rest or if the baby was going to come early,” said Merritt. “I thought ‘We’ll be SOL if this baby comes early’ because we hadn’t really bought anything. If this box had arrived in the mail, I would have felt totally fine and that we were in a good place for the first few months.”
Having just left her job at MSLGroup to focus on the bootstrapped company full time, Merritt said she is excited to dive fully into the startup world.
“I’m really excited about taking the plunge,” she said. “It’s definitely daunting and scary, but I know and I believe that I can do this.”
Images via Finnbin.
Does your company have news to share? Send us a tip or a tweet @BuiltInChicago
