The Mum & You Story

At Mum & You, we have an utterly wonderful community of customers, some who are recent and some who have been loyal to us since our launch four years ago.

It’s been a fast-paced journey over the last four years, but the ethos behind the brand remains constant in a world that is often subjected to shifting priorities and change.

Many of our customers love our products, but do you know much about our purpose and drive? Read on to learn more about what is at the core of Mum & You.

What was the inspiration behind Mum & You?

Our vision is a world in which children grow up to be healthy, strong, and supported. We want to see children meet their full potential and this is ultimately where our core value stems from.

Our founder and dad Rajiv Chandra shares where his vision for Mum & You came from, and what drove him to found the company.

“Wherever my wife and I lived (whether it was a rich country or a poor one) we saw kids fall through the cracks. Many children, we found, just didn’t live to meet their full potential. In the UK alone, about 30% of children entering school do not have basic vocabulary and communication skills. Many of these children who are not ‘school ready’ lag behind through school and beyond. So, helping children meet their full potential became our central focus.

This became a huge driver for me to leave the relative comfort of the corporate world and start a company that could help enable mums and children. All the years of running companies, understanding diverse cultures, and understanding that it was my time to give back to the world drove me to found ‘Mum & You.”

And of course, we don’t exclude the important role dads play. We have talented dads within our Mum & You team, (including our CEO!). We welcome positive changes that enable dads to play a bigger role, like being able to take shared parental leave. However, the reality is mums are still more often the main caregivers, the ones more often to have taken career breaks, moved to part-time, or doing the bulk of school runs.

What do we do to support mums?

Our focus is to empower mums, who in turn can effectively support their children.

We have a unique advantage in that almost all of our employees are parents. We know firsthand exactly what parents need to make their lives easier, and we innovate and create products that we would’ve loved to have on hand for our own children. One of our frustrations was only having one hand free during bathtime, so we created our one-handed Newborn Hair & Body Wash. Similarly, we were fed up with seeing our little ones suffer from chapped, sore skin, so we created our bestselling Face the Day Stick balm that helps to soothe irritated and dry skin caused by dribble or the elements.

We keep our group of (mum) customers close to us. Our Mum & You Crew are valued members of our community who offer their feedback and support to the brand with new product launches, reviews, and engagement, with whom we have built a strong relationship over the last four years.

Supporting charities is something that is also very close to our hearts. The Hygiene Bank is a grassroots, community initiative giving hygiene, personal care & household cleaning products to those of us who need them across the UK. They rely on donations which are then sorted by volunteers and repackaged according to the different needs of our community partners.

Our partnership with The Hygiene Bank began very early on when they were a small charity with only a select few donation points across the UK – including our office!

The Hygiene Bank’s mission is one that is close to our ethos and supporting them has been a large part of what we do at Mum & You, and our customers play a vital role in allowing us to continue to support them. Just last year we donated over 113,000 nappies and £2,788 raised by our customers at checkout!

We currently offer customers the option to donate £2 at checkout when completing their order and are delighted to share that we have updated this donation feature to allow customers to make a larger donation should they wish. Additionally, for every customer subscription, we donate 1 pack of nappies to The Hygiene Bank. The Hygiene Bank also allows donors to buy care packages for individuals at £15, families at £25, and new mum and baby care packages for £30.

Interested in learning more about our partnership and how you can support The Hygiene Bank? Read more here.

What do we do to support our Mumployees?

We are a flexible working employer that supports mums back into the workplace after a career break. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we offered a 100% flexible working model that allowed mums to take back control of their work/life balance.

Our employees have the option to work both in the office and from home. We ensure that our employee’s jobs fit seamlessly around their life as parents and caregivers by introducing a harmonious model that allows our employees to work how they see fit.

The problem, as highlighted by Pregnant then Screwed Charity, is that “54,000 women a year lose their job simply for getting pregnant. In addition, 390,000 working mums experience negative and potentially discriminatory treatment at work each year. These numbers almost doubled in a decade. Far from improving, the situation for working mums is rapidly deteriorating.”

At Mum & You, we do not want to see talented mums having to compromise their work-life balance. Instead, we want to enable them to develop a work-life continuum. Our team doesn’t have the traditional 9 to 5 set up and we knew that if we removed that culture, we would be well on our way to truly enabling talented mums to lead a balanced career. Our team is made up of 80% talented mums, many of whom had given up their professional careers after the birth of their kids.

We believe that in our drive to support mums, we start from the mums within our company.

What is Nappychat’s purpose, and why did we introduce it?

At Mum & You, we believe reading stories and chatting through playtime can make a big difference in our babies’ lives in terms of their language development, imagination, and the bonding experience between parent and baby.

To help inspire you (because let’s be honest, sometimes we’re too exhausted to know what to say!) we created our playful tribe of Nappychat characters which appear on our Eco Nappies, Eco Nappy Pants, and packaging. These colorful characters are a great tool to inspire you to chat, sing and read to your babies from day 1.

1. Our vivid characters on every M&Y Nappychat nappy will capture baby’s attention and your imagination, inspiring your storytelling and rhymes to sing together
2. Chatting and telling stories helps build baby’s vocabulary and supports a later love of books, important for their success and happiness in later life. Communicating can begin long before baby can talk, enjoy describing our playful characters and watch baby’s reaction.
3. Baby will soon tell you about their favourite character and want to hear all about them again and again in story form or rhyme. The chatter can continue long after nappy change time too.

Having previously worked with I CAN, the children’s communications charity aiming to equip parents with the tools and resources to help their child develop the right speech and language skills as they grow, we know that parents are a child’s first teacher and that it’s never too early (even pre-birth!) to start bonding with your child and developing their language skills. I CAN mirror this work, and both Mum & You and I CAN feel so strongly about the importance of communication in under 5s.

Do you have any questions about Mum & You that you’d like answered? Would you like to share feedback or any other thoughts about our brand? Please email us at support@mumandyou.com or head over to our Instagram DM’s and let’s have a chat! We love to hear from you.

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