Healthy Baby grew sales more than 60% in 2025 and acquired 50,000 new customers last year, almost entirely without deep marketing investment. New Chief Marketing Officer Meredith Gieskes intends to change that.

Gieskes joined the better-for-you baby products brand in September, after marketing executive roles at cosmetics merchant Birchbox and digital women's health clinic Maven Clinic. She arrives at a business that has grown mostly by word of mouth, with diapers as the workhorse product.

Healthy Baby's flagship product is an Environmental Working Group-verified diaper, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue. The brand claims it was the first to receive EWG verification for a diaper, but Gieskes said competitors have followed suit and the certification no longer sets the brand apart.

"The company hasn't invested deeply into marketing previously. There's a lot of opportunity," Gieskes said. "There are some levers that have been on, but there are a lot of levers that we plan to turn on in the coming weeks and months."

Influencers and community first

One of the first levers is community and influencer marketing. Healthy Baby has built genuine fandom without paid amplification, Gieskes said, and she wants to accelerate that organic momentum by selecting the right influencers and crafting the message they carry to new audiences.

Customer experience is the second priority. "Parents are busy. They've got a lot of competing priorities," Gieskes said. Her team is asking how to make parents' lives easier at every touch point — improving on-site education, streamlining subscription sign-ups and anticipating needs before customers voice them.

Content as the connective tissue

Content marketing sits at the core of Gieskes's playbook, and of her career. The brand is expanding its blog, building out social content and pushing more education into email. "This consumer is hungry to understand," she said. "It's a super crowded space. They have a lot of different choices, and arming them with the information so that they feel like they're making the best choice possible for themselves and their children is important to us."

That transparency extends to manufacturing. "We're peeling back the curtain and talking transparently about how we engineer and manufacture these products, what goes into them, so that parents feel like they have a fully informed perspective when they go to purchase," Gieskes said.

The content push also has a search dimension. Gieskes pointed to generative engine optimization as the biggest shift in digital marketing of the past two or three years, because parents increasingly use LLMs to research brands during the consideration phase.

Rebalancing from performance to awareness

Healthy Baby has leaned heavily on performance marketing in the past. Gieskes does not dismiss it — "performance is an important lever of a digital marketing mix" — but argues it works best "when it's in concert with everything else." Her mandate as CMO is largely to build brand awareness.

Diapers present a narrow acquisition window: parents choose a brand and a subscription, then rarely switch. Gieskes accepts that reality and targets the undecided. "My job is not to sell someone on something. My job is to get in front of the right person at the right time with the right message," she said. Her team is turning on a multitude of channels at once, testing which messages work for which audience segments — especially expectant parents and those "teetering on the edge" of a decision.

A content career shaped at Condé Nast and Birchbox

Gieskes started her career in content at Condé Nast. In 2010, she left for Birchbox because the magazine world felt "antiquated" in its separation of print and digital. At Birchbox she saw how content and voice could drive brand differentiation, and how the company's authentic tone stood apart from the highbrow editorial lens that dominated beauty content at the advent of the blogger era.

The iOS privacy update, which let consumers opt out of tracking, remains a formative lesson. "That threw everyone for a loop," she said. "Everything has just gotten more expensive, and it's much harder to reach that core customer." The episode taught her the value of channel diversification: "You can't have all of your eggs in one basket, nor should you, because you don't own these platforms."

On the CMO role itself, Gieskes said the job has shifted decisively toward storytelling. "If you have a multitude of different options available to you, you want to go with a brand or a product that has a point of view," she said. "At Healthy Baby, we have a strong POV. My job as CMO here is to express that and make sure that that is front and center so that people don't confuse us with the other diaper brands."

With new channels switching on in the coming weeks and months, Healthy Baby's first serious brand-building push will test whether content-led education and influencer amplification can convert a word-of-mouth business into a category leader.