Jessica Rolph is the co-founder & CEO of Lovevery, an early learning brand best known for their subscription Play Kits. Until now, the company was on a mission to help with babies’ development through play for the first 36 months of life. Today, the brand is making a big announcement: the first ever expansion to now include stage-based play essentials designed through age three, which they are calling the “Year of Me.” The new Play Kits focus on three-year-olds’ social emotional development and their craving for independence.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Rolph just prior to today’s announcement.
Jessica Rolph, CEO and founder of Lovevery
c/o Lovevery
Amy Shoenthal: How did you come up with the idea for Lovevery?
Jessica Rolph: I’m deeply passionate about children’s health and learning. I felt really confident about what I was feeding my baby because of my experience at Happy Family (Rolph’s first company, now the number one organic baby food brand in the country.) But then I started to wonder, what should I be doing to help my baby’s brain develop?
At the time, my youngest was playing with one of those plastic toys with the flashing lights and I just didn’t get what it was actually doing for his development.
I discovered a doctoral thesis by Dr. William Staso on the infant brain that had all these detailed, nerdy, cool things that I could do. For example, babies love the concept of containment at a certain time. The pot and pan phase. One day I was going to the hardware store and asked my husband to cut a PVC pipe in half. I said we’ll give it to our baby to roll a ball through it. But then I wondered, what if it were clear, they could see the ball falling through the tube and that would be so much better. I started dreaming about products to create, taking this science and making it into a system of products that relate to early learning. I never looked at our toys the same way again.
I had this renewed confidence that I understood what my baby was hungry to learn. I wanted to share that feeling of confidence with other parents which is the reason we started Lovevery.
Shoenthal: What did the thesis say?
Rolph: It was never published. It was academic research but what I loved about it was that it went a step further to show all these things you could put into action as a parent. Dr. Staso recommended giving babies a lot of these high contrast images and making them more complex over time. We ended up buying the rights to the paper, and now he’s an advisor to us. He reviews all of our play guides and makes sure that they’re in line with what’s happening developmentally. He’s one of the many reviewers of our materials.
Shoenthal: How did you start to build your team as you embarked on this new venture?
Rolph: I really believe in partnerships, and I knew I needed to find a co-founder to fully bring the idea to life. I’ve known Roderick for 20 years; he is my best friend’s husband. He has experience building DTC (direct to consumer) with a digital first mindset. We both had this high growth scaling experience. He’s owned our revenue side of the business.
He had the perfect experience and expertise to help me build a mission-driven company, and I knew he’d make an incredible partner in starting Lovevery. I told him my idea and he offered to be my partner. We are 50/50 co-founders, he takes the role of President and I’m the CEO.
Shoenthal: What obstacles did you face as you started to build?
Rolph: When I went to launch Lovevery, I started studying the concept of design thinking. I don’t have deep training in design thinking from IDEO or any of the thought leaders in that space. But I read a lot of case studies, and realized that we could actually mimic that process in a really thoughtful way without having to hire an agency to help us do it. I felt like it was really important to study our market and really understand and simulate that product.
One of the principles of design thinking is to create something ugly so when you ask someone for feedback you give them the freedom to critique it. We assembled Play Kits and showed them to families and enlisted that sort of honest feedback to make the product better. We followed the progress of 25 babies from all sorts of backgrounds. For example, we had one baby who was the fifth kid in their family and they were on government assistance. We also had an only child in Oakland; it went from there all the way to families who were making over a million dollars a year.
Rod and I were determined through lots of parent testing to get our first product right. We had so many failed designs, and kept going back to design and testing. At one point I think our team was really losing trust that we were ever going to launch the company.
Shoenthal: What was one moment where you realized you were starting to see success early on?
Rolph: It was really hard to raise the seed funding we needed for Happy Family and I was bracing myself for the same with Lovevery. The early rounds are so hard, when you are just selling an idea. We have always believed in keeping minimums really low and not being afraid to have a cap table with a lot of investors. Although it wasn’t easy, we had a lot more momentum with Lovevery. The seed round at Happy Family was $550,000, and our seed at Lovevery was $3.1 Million, and it took about half the time to raise.
Another moment is when we had the Shopify “cha-ching” sound play on our computer every time we had a sale and would celebrate. I think a lot of early stage DTC founders know this sound. When we launched the Play Kits, we saw a flood of customers subscribing in the first hour and had to turn off our phone notifications.
I still get excited when I hear a parent talking about how much their baby loves the Play Gym or Play Kits, something that now happens on a daily basis. My friend recently had a baby and one Saturday a few weeks ago I went over to their house. Watching the baby in the Play Gym, I was just amazed by how engaged they were and happy to be playing. Those seemingly small moments are what feel like success to me.
Shoenthal: You were somewhat poised to help parents suddenly stuck at home with their kids out of daycare when the pandemic first hit.
Rolph: Parents were really hungry and looking for parenting advice during the pandemic, looking for ways to engage with their baby based on the stuff that they already had at home.
In many cases, our products and services became a lifeline for families. Parents (myself included) were homebound, juggling childcare with remote work and the general stress and challenges that the pandemic created for so many. Our mission is to be a support system for families, and we doubled down on that with at-home activity ideas for our parent community and new products, like an e-book to help children make sense of the pandemic.
We set up a lot of content in a short amount of time. We are all about giving your child your attention, focusing and being really intentional. We’re not about just getting an iPad and using that to get your other things done. And we’re not about multitasking when you’re around your kids. We’re about putting down your phone and being present with them.
At the same time, a majority of people on our team are also parents themselves. At the beginning of the pandemic, what we were asking our employees to do, fundamentally, was to work at home with really spotty childcare or no childcare at all, and take advantage of this unbelievable opportunity that we had to service hundreds of thousands of parents. But in doing so, we were asking them to compromise their own parenting.
I really lost a lot of sleep over this the first week or two and didn’t know what to do. We ended up coming up with a solution that I think was really well received. We paid for 1:1 childcare. We offered to make some connections, whether it was friends, kids coming home from college, paying local agencies or letting people figure it out and providing a stipend.
We also understood that not everyone was comfortable inviting somebody into their homes during Covid and so with school aged children, we paid a $30 a day stipend for learning toys like activities, crafts, building sets, and more. The $30 a day added up.
Honestly, it really wasn’t a large expense when it really came down to it. Because we were supporting our employees, we were helping them be productive. I felt like we could operate with integrity. It was just such a stressful time.
From a business standpoint, we were able to take advantage of low acquisition cost for customers. So the cpms really went down significantly. We were able to retain a very high percentage of our customers. Once somebody becomes a part of our learning program, they don’t want to cancel. I mean, it’s their child’s development.
We had so much growth last year, we’re now about a year ahead of our forecast. We were just very fortunate.
Shoenthal: What are you most excited about right now?
Rolph: Expanding the Play Kits to another year of life. Families have been with us from infancy through the age of 4 now. It’s really unusual to have that kind of retention. We also have therapists who are proactively using our products in therapy with children with speech issues or special needs. We have physical therapists that are giving us activity ideas, fresh ways to play and new ideas for how to tweak products based on their expertise.
I’m excited about more of that type of co-creation with our community. We never lost that obsession with testing and with product and really listening to our customers. It has created this really positive cycle for us.
We’re always listening so that we can better serve the needs of parents. One example is Adela Comes Home, a book included in our three-year-old Play Kits. It documents three-year-old Adela, her Nune’ (mother) and her Yaya (grandma), who are members of the Coeur d’Alene Nation, as they visit their ancestral land and participate in meaningful traditions together.
This book was created in response to a representation audit that we did across our books last year to see if there were any voices that we might be missing. Our community overwhelmingly felt that we needed Indigenous voices, so we immediately began our search for a family interested in sharing their story.
We’ll be releasing a book later this year about a child with a limb difference. Her mom reached out and asked if we could represent her story. We follow her on a day at the park, and it’s wonderful to see this little girl expressing healthy boundaries, responding to other children’s curiosity about her prosthetic, learning to socialize, and having fun!
Shoenthal: What advice would you give to others starting their own business or embarking on a new venture?
Rolph: Don’t get bogged down by the idea of what success should look like. Instead let yourself be guided by your passion, curiosity and the impact that you want to have on the world.
