04 Jul babyREFLUX
babyREFLUX is an online retail enterprise and trading division of GroupFMI Limited set up in 2008. babyREFLUX was the first company to offer specialist devices for parents and carers of babies suffering with infant reflux and reflux related illnesses.
Now the largest supplier of reflux related products in Europe supporting over 45,000 parents and carers annually.
There are about 3 million small businesses with less that 10 employees in the UK and that’s how babyREFLUX started. We were a husband and wife team working in our spare time out of our home. Until 2007, Jonathan managed a software business and a marketing consultancy, and his wife Rachel was working as a product manager for a video games company. But all that changed when their third daughter Willow arrived in March 2007 and was diagnosed with Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease [GORD], or ‘baby reflux’ for short.
The condition meant that Willow was extremely sick with projectile vomiting at every feed, waking every hour, every night, with no end in sight. This prompted them to look for sleeping devices that would help Willow sleep and keep the acid and feeds in her tummy down. As there were no products available in the UK, they imported devices from all over the world. In next to no time, they had accumulated some quite specialist baby reflux products – many imported from the USA, Australasia and Europe.
We realised there was both a knowledge gap and a product gap in the UK. We built a web portal for UK parents to discover more about baby reflux and sold a few of the devices we had imported in an online store. As more people became aware of the devices sales grew until we had to import even more! At that point we turned our small venture into a ‘proper’ business and set up babyREFLUX [www.babyreflux.co.uk].
In the last few years we have moved into a new warehouse, implemented large business management software and taken on new staff.
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