When Pallavi Utagi's baby got a diaper rash for the first time, she started to learn more about the negative impact of disposable diapers on babies' skin, and how they were extremely harmful to the environment, with each disposable diaper taking 500+ years to disintegrate.
When she looked for high-performance cloth diapers that were as convenient as disposable ones, Pallavi discovered that they were either unavailable in India or too expensive for the Indian market. That led the former marketing professional to launch Superbottoms in 2016.
Educating parents about cloth diapering and its benefits as well as encouraging post purchase usage have been key challenges for them.
"We started using WhatsApp even before our website went up," says Pallavi. "We used it to take customer orders. However, we truly formalized the usage when we officially launched India's first cloth diaper helpline run on WhatsApp in mid-2016."
Today, Superbottoms leverages the WhatsApp Business app for almost every step of the customer's lifecycle. Pallavi finds the greeting and away messages, and quick replies features especially useful.
Today, the Superbottoms team answers about 150 to 180 queries a day on WhatsApp Business. On busy days, that number goes up to 200+. They are also strengthening a mom-led retail networking channel. "This gives mothers a great opportunity to work from home and also double up as our brand ambassadors."
What started in Pallavi's spare bedroom has now grown to a large warehouse with over 25 employees serving 50,000 parents who have one less thing to worry about.