At KISS we’re all quite excited at the moment, because in a few months one of us is going on maternity leave. There’s something about having a pregnancy in the office that makes you look at baby brands with a kind of analytical brand lens you can never quite switch off once you’re a strategist (slightly frustratingly).
In fairness, I’d already started noticing it before this, while watching friends’ baby shower gift lists, clocking the brands that kept coming up in conversation. I started to see a pattern in how parenthood is packaged, sold, and performed right now.
Peachies vs Pampers
There’s a brand called Peachies that’s been everywhere recently. They ran a brilliant campaign called “Blood, Sweat, Tears, Baby” about the actual realities of parenthood, that departs from the classic love-driven soft-focus version, and the way they’ve built their brand world is really different. The art direction, for example, is built entirely around this tension that new parenthood is not only about having children, but also about maintaining your pre-parenthood lifestyle whilst having them. Still being able to go out with your mates, still turning up to clubs or events, and not being about permanently running on empty, or walking round with baby sick down your top. Peachies' own website imagery is basically that as their shot list, a mum mid-sip of wine with the baby sitting in her jumper, another in a going-out ‘fit and full vibrant orange hair reaching for the delivery box, and one on the phone in a sharp blazer, with the baby just hanging out. The nappy is barely the point. What's actually being sold is continuity, the proof you didn't disappear into parenthood, you just added a very well-dressed baby to the life you already had.
In a YouGov survey of 1,050 UK mothers this year found 55% reported a loss of identity after becoming a mother, with 78% experiencing some form of role confusion post-birth. That’s the feeling Peachies is standing against, not necessarily just wetness or leaks, but the sense that “mother” or “parent” has erased the individual person underneath it.
Peachies raised £2.1m from Arma Vir Partners, became a certified B-Corp in November 2024, and picked up Startup of the Year at The Grocer Gold Awards 2025. There’s been real institutional validation for this five-year-old challenger brand, it’s being taken as seriously as the legacy players it’s up against.
By contrast, growing up my dad worked for Procter & Gamble, so we were a Pampers family. What I noticed is that Pampers caters to the baby’s needs: how long it’ll keep them dry, stopping the “poonami,” comfort, catering to developmental stages. Whereas Peachies decentres the child. They lead with their B-Corp status, talk about honest parenting, and are driven by the brand’s slick contemporary aesthetic. Even the website feels like a tech company’s, super clean, stats up front, a slick 3D render of the nappy itself. It’s a baby brand in a way that has nothing to do with babies.
I think that is the distinction. Pampers markets to the fact that you are a parent, with a baby. Peachies markets to the identity of the parent doing the buying. Rather than centring in on “you have a baby,” it centres on “who are you, and what does buying this say about you.” That’s where the strength of their brand identity actually comes from. I think it shows, to a degree, parenthood is becoming more aspirational, and baby and childcare brands having to step up accordingly.
Why now
So why now? A couple of things, cultural and economic, feeding into each other.
The UK fertility rate is at a record low, 1.39 births per woman, the lowest since 1977. So it could be easy to conclude that “everyone wants kids now.” For most of history, having children was the default next step after marriage, driven by heteronormative and often religious expectation.
However, I don’t think that is what is happening. Now, for the majority of parents, there’s a real cost calculation involved in choosing to have them at all. Full-time nursery in England now averages £12,000–14,000 a year, rising to £20,000–24,000 in London. And the parents who do go ahead are older than they’ve ever been: the average mother is now 31.1, the average father 34, both up from the mid-to-late twenties in 1975.
What’s also shrinking is family size and the pool of people having kids, so what’s rising is spend per child within a smaller, older, wealthier group. That’s showing up in the market data, too, the luxury kids’ products market is forecast to grow from $46.7bn this year to $80.7bn by 2036. People are unlikely to have more than two or three children, but they’re spending more visibly on the ones they do have. It’s become cool to have children in this climate, because it proves you have the means and the privilege to afford them.
What does the future of culturally savvy parenthood brand actually look like?
Peachies is still the best case study here. It’s a brand that speaks to the parent’s identity as much as the child’s needs. In the future, I can see baby brands leaning on fashion and cultural brand codes, drops, collabs, and aesthetic packaging rather than classic baby-aisle codes of softness and cuteness. It sells competence and taste as a parenting virtue, not just banking on love.
Unresolved thoughts
A few things I haven’t settled. Is this take on culturally savvy parenthood actually new, or is it just “yummy mummy,” or the old “have it all, be a girlboss and a great mum” idea, repackaged for a platform economy?
Eugene Healey, in the piece that started me down this road, argues that parenthood has “replaced eternal youth as our culture’s central (or at least, sole) desire.” I’m not sure that holds up. If it were really our central desire, you wouldn’t expect the fertility rate sitting at a record low of 1.39, births at their lowest since 1977. What’s aspirational isn’t quite as simple as having children, it’s the visible ability to afford having them. That’s a much narrower, much more exclusive performance than “central cultural desire” suggests, and it’s worth being precise about who it’s actually for.
Let me know what you think, is this just a repackaging of motherhood, or are new desires driving parental purchase patterns?