It was the year 2020, when India’s one of the favourite kids’ brands, Rabitat, was born with a simple belief: ‘in parenting, Little Things Matter’. The product was aimed at filling the persistent gap in the Indian parenting market with a keen indulgence in safety, functionality, and design. Rabitat flaunts in catering to millennial parents aged 25–40, primarily in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, with a growing presence across India through e-commerce.
These products are available on the brand’s D2C website, Amazon, Flipkart, FirstCry, Myntra, Blinkit, Zepto, and in-store at Hamleys.
MI talks with Sumit Suneja, Co-Founder, Rabitat. In this exclusive interaction, he speaks about their founding story, campaigns, and challenges in the segment. “Building our team strength and engineering our product strength”, Sumit says as he speaks about the plan for growth. As we converse further, he underlines their present competitor in the segment.
Read the story here and follow along.
Edited excerpts here:
Q) Origin story.
Sumit: I wanted to do something that would make a dent in the consumer space. So, a few years back, a critical data report suggested that our parenting focus has turned into assisted parenting. What is assisted parenting, one might wonder. It is not a naturally grown phase but is being assisted by many sources, including publications, media, groups, and communities. And not just by mothers. This led to a great revelation in the year 2013-14 – Indian people are buying parenting products from Amazon.com. It further said the bestselling product on the platform, besides books and technology, is parenting products. However, there were feeding bottles available in the Indian market, people still chose to buy them from the United States. It was astonishing to see, though we understood that it was 1% of the population who could afford a Rs. 2000 feeding bottle. But why do they have to buy these bottles from somewhere else is the question. So then we put research into this space and started understanding this space a little better. It’s a wide category.
Also read: Consumer Study Highlights How Urban Parents Are Redefining Safety and Trust—Insights Commissioned by Rabitat
We realized that parents like to know about the quality and materials of the product touching their baby’s food while storing it, because food safety is a big deal for them. We dug deep into understanding the food contact products as a category in India. Then, we decided to focus on consumer durable products, which include everything that touches food. That’s what we are solving- mastering our material sciences with research to back up.
Q) Challenges in penetration into the deeper markets.
Sumit: The whole food contact product category is difficult. If you see the category of feeding bottles and weaning, it’s trust-based. Another difficulty is the adult product category, where parents don’t care for these as much as they do for kids. So we picked up category 2-6 years. Then we expanded into 2-10 years. This is where we felt we could do justice and build trust. So that’s the trajectory we’re moving and now we are going deeper into feeding and weaning this year.
Q) Current offerings/portfolio.
Sumit: Right now, our product portfolio starts from hydration, mostly bottles and cups for kids from ages 2 to 10 years. Then we have lunchboxes in these two categories. And we also have tableware for young kids now.
All our products are well-designed. For example, our lunch boxes are designed in a way that the food will never touch the plastic. We also have bottles with a silicon tip and a cover on top.
Another product that might reach you in the next quarter is a bottle filter straw attached to the kids’ water bottles. This will help kids get filtered water anywhere and everywhere outside the home.
Q) Competitors.
Sumit: I don’t see Milton as a competitor until we step into the adult category. They have done great work on the adult side. But we found this entire 2-10 years empty and unorganized. So we don’t have much bigger competition except for a few startups. Now we are entering, feeding and weaning, Philips Avent, Chicco, Dr. Brown, will be our direct competition this year onwards.
Q) You currently raised Series A funding of 40 crores rupees. How are you planning to use that in your business?
Sumit: The key deployment is building our team strength and engineering our product strength. Secondly, we have to spend a bit on brand and marketing that we’ve not done from the beginning. Third, our channels.
Also read: D2C brand Rabitat secures ₹40 Cr funding in Series A
Q) Revenue.
Sumit: In terms of channel mix, we have about 40% coming from our own D2C. Another 40% would come from various marketplaces, which include quick commerce. Right now, Quick Com would be 7% or 8%. We also started our offline channel, where we have kiosks inside malls, which are doing well. We now have 7-8 kiosks across Delhi and Bangalore. We will be adding 5-7 kiosks QoQ. On the offline front, by the end of 2028, we will be adding more than 200 kiosks across top and medium-sized malls pan-India.
Q) Festive campaigns.
Sumit: Our first marketing campaign was released in August – the Rakshabandhan campaign. This campaign was a great success, where we talked about the bonds of siblings. Next, we will ramp up on Christmas this year. We will also be scaling up big on the Back to School season that will come next year, from March to July, across the country.
Additionally, we will be actively looking to work with influencers, micro parenting, and other influencers. Once we cross our benchmarks led to about 300 crores, we would be scaling on much bigger platforms.
Q) Growth plans and vision.
Sumit: I just really see our sales doing good. In the next 36 months, we will cross 300-350 crores. We will be crossing 100 cores this year. So we’ll see 4x growth this year. Hopefully, in the next 3 years, we’ll be crossing the 300 crores target only in the parenting space.
