NZ’s Nature Baby brand expanding overseas while launching a pre-loved organic recycling scheme

Jacob and Georgia Faull started organic babywear company Nature Baby, now a multi-million-dollar business, from their Grey Lynn flat 25 years ago. Photo / Michael Craig

What started as a tiny start-up selling organic babywear from an Auckland flat 25 years ago is now a multimillion-dollar business. Jane Phare talks to the co-founders of Nature Baby about their expansion plans.

Back in the late 1990s when Jacob and Georgia Faull had a stall at East London’s Spitalfields Market, they became increasingly aware of all things organic. The organic food movement had taken off but organic textiles were in their infancy.

When Georgia became pregnant with the first of their three children, the couple headed to Planet Organic in London, one of the few stores stocking organic baby garments. Loving the softness and durability of the cotton garments they bought, the couple took the idea back to New Zealand when they returned from their OE. That was 25 years ago and since then Nature Baby has been a steadily-growing success story.

They launched the business from their Grey Lynn flat, posting out catalogues to potential customers who sent back cheques in the mail with their orders. The clothing was made either from organic cotton or organic merino wool. Georgia Faull was in charge of design.

Friends and advisers told the couple their business model wouldn’t work, but it did. Within a year they had a growing online business and had opened their first retail store in Grey Lynn.

“We realised that people wanted to touch and feel the products we were selling,” Jacob Faull says. Five years later they opened a second store in Newmarket, followed by Wellington and Sydney. The business now employs 55 people.

Nature Baby founders Georgia and Jacob Faull at their Newmarket store. The stores are kept peaceful and away from busy shopping streets. Photo / Michael Craig

The New Zealand stores are deliberately destination shopping: off the main street with easy parking nearby, quiet airy spaces where parents can pop their youngsters in a large playpen in the middle while they look at clothing – from babies to 5 years – toys, books, bedding and furniture.

In addition, the Faulls have grown the wholesale market in New Zealand and Australia, and to a lesser extent in Europe, the US and Asia. Now they’re ready for Nature Baby’s next growth stage. The first will be a capital raise using “smart money” in the order of $10 million-plus to spread into the US wholesale market.

“We are looking for partners that are already operating in those markets so that they’re able to contribute strategically to the growth rather than just [using] funding that we could get from the bank,” Faull says. Additional retail stores in Australia are also a possibility.

But it’s the wholesale arm of the expansion the couple believe will be the key, growing that side slowly and steadily. They’ve already been through the boom-and-bust experience with the likes of US e-commerce and retail giant J.Crew which stocked Nature Baby between 2014 and 2018.

“That was huge,” remembers Faull. “We had half a million [dollars] going through them a year.”

The garments started showing up in movies and on celebrities’ babies.

It was, he says, a dream come true, exposure that drove online sales. That was until J.Crew’s sales started lagging in the face of competition and the pandemic hit causing the company to file for bankruptcy in 2020. That left a big hole in Nature Baby’s sales but it taught the couple a valuable lesson – that slow, sustainable growth they could count on was the key.

Good for eight babies

This month the company is also launching a Nature Baby “Worn Again” initiative, to encourage customers to recycle the clothing. The business concept is still in the formative stage but the couple is determined not to contribute unduly to the 180,000 tonnes of clothing and textile waste that is dumped into landfill in New Zealand each year.

The idea is that customers who return pre-loved Nature Baby clothing will get 20 per cent of the original purchase price back which can then be used to buy new clothing in the store. Faull is considering opening a store that will sell recycled Nature Baby wear in good condition, coupled with an online store. Anything damaged or too stained will go to textile recycling company Impac Tex, knowing that cotton and merino fabrics have a higher resale value.

The Faulls have been learning from fashion brand Patagonia, and from Manymoons Organic Clothing in New York which hires out babywear and sells recycled organic clothing. Manymoons is a client of Nature Baby having discovered how many times they can rent out the same garment.

“We’ve based our model off the testing we’ve done with them [Manymoons],” Faull says. That testing showed that a cheaper brand might last two babies’ worth of wear whereas Nature Baby garments lasted eight babies.

“So the cost of hiring out Nature Baby became cheaper than the cheaper brands because it would last longer.”

One of Nature Baby’s early baby models for their catalogue, 22-year-old Haromi Te Ata Karaitiana, can attest to the product’s longevity. She was a toddler when she modelled clothing for Nature Baby, garments that were then passed to siblings and cousins, and later returned to her.

Haromi Te Ata Karaitiana, now aged 22, as a toddler modelling babywear for one of Nature Baby's early catalogues.

Karaitiana now has a daughter of her own, 3-month-old Aio Te Ata who is wearing the original garments modelled by her mother.

Karaitiana is still a fan of the brand.

“My baby lives in Nature Baby. We’ve got everything.”

Haromi Te Ata Karaitiana with her 3-month old daughter Aio Te Ata who is wrapped in a Nature Baby blanket and now wears some of the original clothing her mother modelled more than 20 years ago.

Faull believes Worn Again will become a valuable part of the company’s growth, tapping into a new generation increasingly aware of sustainability.

“It’s already an inter-generational business,” Faull says. “We’re starting to see babies that wore clothing in the beginning now coming back as parents...”

Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.