It’s been nearly a year since we last talked about the Finnish parenting start up Wauwaa. Then they had closed a seed round to launch an online platform for parents. It’s the success of that platform that has lead to this new round of investment, to improve the website and service to drive even more growth.
It’s only been six months since Wauwaa launched their website and they are already excited to share some information which they feel shows how impressive their growth has been. We’re told that hundreds of brands have signed up to the service, that ten per cent of first time visitors to the site make a purchase, a figure that’s way above the industry standard one percent, and that they are performing much better across social media channels than their closest rivals.
Ivan Lopez, CEO and Co-founder, Wauwaa, said, “Our platform has been built with two things in mind – understanding and giving our customers what they want, when they want it and scale. We are seeing significant traction from visitors to the site, the average shopping basket increasing, the LTV of the customer extending and engagement through our social media activity soaring. This investment will help us build on this success and give our customers more quality curated content and grow the selection of our specially priced product offers.”
Wauwaa have structured their service so that parents arrive at the site through some of the video content and blogs that that provide information and ideas on parenting, something that all would-be and new parents search for. They then connect such content to products that these parents and soon to be parents might be interested in buying. It’s a simple idea, but a tricking one to pull off.
We’re told that the investment from Vision+ Fund will be used to continue development on Wauwaa’s platform. This essentially means producing even more content that will ensure future prospective parents are drawn to the website, be able to work on special offers which will also entice parents at every stage of a baby’s development, and to continue improving the company’s social media presence.
Mr. Tero Ojanperä, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Vision+ Fund, said, “Wauwaa has compelling and relevant curated content for parents and parents-to-be which is combined with tailored special offers. This approach is proving popular with customers and the supporting metrics are impressive. We believe Wauwaa has a winning formula for future success and significant growth and we are delighted to invest and support the team.”
The Vision+ Fund investment, plus the previous investments we’ve covered in the past from private investors and Tekes, the Finnish government agency, takes the total funding in Wauwaa to in excess of €1 million. Just goes to show, there’ll always be money in diapers.
