After having a baby, software engineer Natalie Gordon desperately needed someone to walk her German Shepard every morning. Not sure how to start, she coded her solution — a list that links parents to services, serves up gift registries, and delivers expert reviews on products from baby bottles to car seats. (There’s even a list of products covered by flexible spending and health savings accounts, and a link to check if your insurance will cover a free breast pump.)
About 14 years later, nine million people have selected gifts from Babylist registries, picking 100 million gifts since launch. The company also partners with some of the biggest brands in the parenting marketplace, including vitamin maker Olly, retailers such as The Gap, and Pampers, which quickly became the backbone of every sampling box sent to new parents. Customers can even test drive a new stroller across different terrain in the Babylist Los Angeles showroom, with a New York City space launching in 2026.
Speaking at Signal 2025, Gordon, based in Silicon Valley, is clear about the true backbone of Babylist, and it’s not the technology underpinning every gift transaction and every successful site visit and registry build. To Babylist’s founder and CEO, it’s the people who rely on the site to support them through one of the most profound and exciting journeys in their lives. Build for relationships, she says, and the transactions will come, along with customers who feel more connected to your brand.
“Our biggest asset is the trust and engagement of this audience,” she says.
Her next endeavor? Content for the site driven by — and designed singularly — for AI. Gordon says that just as retail has transformed from an in-person experience to one driven by online connections, so too must the content and media driving the Babylist story, so they can “evolve and serve the next generation of parents,” she says.
You can hear more from Gordon in the video from her talk at Signal 2025 about BabyList’s odyssey, or read our lightly edited transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT
My name is Natalie Gordon. I’m the CEO and founder of Babylist. Fourteen years ago, I was pregnant.
I was standing in Babies “R” Us, and I felt overwhelmed. I was crying. I was literally in the bottle section looking at 1,000 bottles with no idea which products I needed, what I wanted.
I was overwhelmed and in tears. And the one thing I knew is I really wanted to be a good mom. I needed to figure this out.
I’m a software engineer, and I did what any engineer does when faced with a problem. I built the tool to solve it. I’m so excited to share the Babylist journey with you this afternoon, including our transformative partnership with Pampers and P&G and key insights that have driven us to become the billion-dollar company we are today.
Babylist launched in 2011, and now in 2025, we really are the leading platform for families. Babylist started as a baby registry. You could put absolutely anything onto it from any store, and you can add things to it that are like the really important things you need.
For our family, that was someone to come at 7 a.m. and actually walk our German Shepherd for us. That was like the thing that would be so meaningful to our family. Since launch, we’ve expanded very strategically into commerce, health, media, and brick and mortar.
I’m going to come back to this graph, guess to yourself the year that we began working with the Pampers team for the first time and did our first joint business plan. I know this is an international audience, and I know baby registries, they exist in some countries, but they’re very American. A baby registry, it’s essentially a wish list.
And so the expecting parents, it’s almost always mom. She creates a list of absolutely every product she’s going to need in the first year of baby’s life. This is like a real way she’s getting prepared before baby’s here.
Then she shares it with friends and family, often around this amazing celebration event of the baby shower. Friends and family love it. They want to gift things that will actually be used.
They want to be helpful. They want to make sure no one buys you the same gift. This is the answer to receiving 10 cashmere blankets that are monogrammed.
And sharing with friends and family is like the most powerful element of a registry. The registry is just a list of products, but when it connects you to friends and family, the people who love you and want to support you, and the new baby, that’s where the real magic happens. In my own life, in the pandemic, my brother had two babies, which meant I couldn’t see them.
I wanted so much to show up as a sister and as a sister-in-law, and I wanted to be a great aunt. And so I wasn’t just purchasing a product from a list. I was actually purchasing many products.
But I was signing up to join their team baby. And so when you purchase from the registry, it’s not just the transaction. It’s you showing up in your relationship with the new parents in this new life.
And so it’s team baby that’s driven our growth. And so this year, nine million people will give a gift on the Babylist platform. They will join someone’s team baby.
They might join many team babies, driving $1.4 billion in product GMV this year. And so if I leave you with one thing today, it’s that relationships are the foundation, and then the transactions are the byproduct. I wanted to bring this together in a personal, timely way.
Three weeks ago, my son Max, who was the baby, who was the inspiration for all of this, he had his very first day of high school. I have all of the emotions about that, mostly nervousness. I really want him to do well.
I’m nervous to hear how today went at school. And I can tell you, I have bought him four sticks of Old Spice deodorant in the past year. I am trying to be the best mom I can be for him.
It’s not that much different than when I was researching car seats or choosing my diapers 14 years ago. And so when you have a baby, it’s not just the stuff. It’s getting it right as a mom, as a grandma, as a godparent.
We will lose if we treated this like it was just a transactional shopping experience. And so this building for connection, it’s not unique to a gift registry. Babylist is a platform that can strengthen connections between you and your friends and your family.
Team Baby. There are other platforms bringing in real world connections to their digital experiences. Flow is a leading period tracking app.
25% of women in the U.S. use it to track their menstruation. Recently, Flow launched partner mode. And so knowing this data from their app is helpful to the woman herself, this is actually making it helpful to partners too.
And so today, 2 million male partners are using Flow to understand and support their partners. Online dating can be very transactional. Bumble lets you find matches for your friends and makes this a social activity.
You’re no longer swiping left or right alone. Your friends are supporting you in finding the one. Babylist, over the past 14 years, there have been 100 million gifts given off of the Babylist platform.
That’s a lot of transactions. It’s the connections we’ve built across Team Baby that have driven that. So those 100 million gifts given, that’s been the journey.
In 2013, I was raising a seed round. And I was trying to prove there was a massive market here, that Babylist could one day become a billion dollar company. I had a slide, and the slide had the headline, Babies Need a Lot of Stuff.
That is true. Relationships are the foundation. There are a lot of transactions when you have a baby.
Look at these numbers. Parents spend 22 hours building their registry. They visit, and this is all on average, they visit Babylist 187 times before a baby arrives.
They research and add 218 items to their registry. And before a baby arrives, first-time parents only know of a few baby brands, like Pampers. Every single product, they’re figuring out for the first time.
They’re hard product decisions. Our job at Babylist is to help them feel confident in those decisions, so they don’t have that feeling of standing in the middle of Babies “R” Us looking at 1,000 bottles. And so over the last 15 years, we’ve really said, how should Babylist grow next? We focus so much on the registry.
What else can Babylist be? And I’m a software engineer. We’re based in Silicon Valley. We built this amazing registry tech.
It felt really obvious that we would be a tech company. It’s all about this registry. It’s about this software we’d written.
The next thing we should go and do is launch a wedding registry. And we decided against that. We said the biggest asset we have is the trust and engagement of this audience.
We consider our audience, that’s the expecting parents, new parents, and team baby. And so each new capability we’ve built has created a compounding effect that really creates a stronger whole and builds our business and builds our brand. One example is our brick and mortar.
The Babylist showroom launched two years ago in Los Angeles. I have been highly skeptical of the business model of brick and mortar, of physical retail in the baby category. And parents want to try out products.
We created a 100% experiential space. It’s a showroom without a single cash register where parents can test out products. There’s a stroller track with various types of terrain you would push the stroller on.
Parents can push the stroller and then they can add it to their registry. The showroom over the past two years has been the backbone of our brand marketing. Last year over 200 influencers visited the LA showroom generating 45 million social impressions.
One thing we got wrong when we were launching the showroom was our estimation of foot traffic. Because we thought that parents would come in as individuals or as partners. But they’re actually walking in with all of team baby.
They’re coming in with their parents, with their best friends. And they’re really excited to share this experience. And I’m asked all the time, when are you going to build the second showroom or the 10th showroom? And I’m really excited to announce we’re going to open up our baby list NYC in 2026.
Just as retail has transformed over the past decade, so has content and media. And so we create content for your pregnancy and parenting journey, not for the Gregorian calendar. Having a baby, it’s the ultimate life cycle.
You can apply a life cycle marketing too. Content has really evolved over the last decade. We were very successful 10 years ago with comprehensive SEO optimized product guides.
We shifted focus and investment to video and video content platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, where we have 2 million subscribers. We’re looking ahead at what the next generation of parents will expect. And they’ll obviously expect AI powered experiences.
We’ll continue to build long form content. It’s the core of how people will interact with product decisions on LLM models. But our current product discovery surface areas will seem stale and out of date within a few years.
We’re starting to invest and build in those AI first experiences. So we need to evolve and serve the next generation of parents and what their consumer expectations are, while always maintaining our core vision of supporting happy, healthy families. Okay, I told you I would show you this graph again.
What year did we begin working with Pampers? We kicked off our long term partnership with P&G in late 2017. The Pampers team had really actually heard about Babylist through their consumer insights. And we started joint business planning, really built fully integrated partnerships over many years.
In 2018, Pampers was the backbone of our free sampling box that we send to expecting moms. It gave us confidence to productize that offering. In 2019, they leaned on evergreen lifecycle marketing to reach every expecting parent on Babylist, paired with deep insights around registry activity and behavior.
Today, what that looks like is an exclusive media partnership for the diapers and wipes category, just demonstrating the depth of this integration and the trust we’ve built over the years. So to wrap up, I want to share three lessons we learned while building Babylist. First, build first for relationships.
The transactions will come. When they do, they will be deeper, more durable, and far more valuable than anything that could be won by chasing short term gains. Second, create long term partnerships.
Great partners understand your mission and amplify your strengths. Together, you build ecosystems that expand what’s possible for both sides and set the standard for how industries move forward. Third, everything has to connect.
Each new capability is a multiplier of the business, not just an addition. The real power is in creating a system where every innovation fuels the next, unlocking exponential momentum rather than incremental progress. Thank you so much.
