Diapers are the workhorse product at Healthy Baby, and new Chief Marketing Officer Meredith Gieskes is focused on telling every parent why.
As the brand’s name implies, Healthy Baby sells better-for-you baby products. This includes its flagship product, an Environmental Working Group-verified diaper, which is the bulk of its revenue. While Healthy Baby claims it is the first brand to have an EWG-verified diaper, other better-for-you diaper brands have followed suit in receiving this verification, and this certification is no longer a differentiator, Gieskes said.
That means the brand needs to innovate, both with diapers and with other baby products, Gieskes said. It also needs to let parents know about its brand. Content and education are pillar marketing tools in the baby products space and ones that Healthy Baby plans to lean into more.
So far, the brand has mostly grown by word of mouth, she said. Sales increased more than 60% in 2025, and Healthy Baby acquired 50,000 new customers last year.
Gieskes joined Healthy Baby in September, after previous marketing executive roles at cosmetics merchant Birchbox and digital women’s health clinic Maven Clinic. She shares more about her marketing strategy for Healthy Baby in the Q&A below.
Chief Marketer: What is the state of marketing at Healthy Baby, and where do you plan to take it?
Gieskes: Healthy Baby is at an interesting point as a business because the company hasn’t invested deeply into marketing previously. There’s a lot of opportunity. 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.
Chief Marketer: What have been some things that Healthy Baby has done, and what haven’t you done?
Gieskes: One of the areas that we’re investing more deeply in now is community and influencer marketing. Healthy Baby has a lot of fandom. There are people who are passionate about the brand. They love the products, and the products are exceptional. The business has grown in large part by word of mouth and organically. We want to accelerate that by tapping into influencers, getting in front of their audiences, obviously selecting the right people and working on what that message is. Larger brand storytelling is important, but that’s one of the big levers that we’re leaning into.
I’d also say that the customer experience, while exceptional, is something that we continue to prioritize. Parents are busy. They’ve got a lot of competing priorities. How can we make their lives easier at every single touch point? How can we think about things for them before they even ask for or even make those requests? How do we improve education on site? How do we improve signing up for our subscription?
Chief Marketer: Do you guys have education on your site?
Gieskes: We do. Content marketing is a core part of my background. We’re building out from a blog standpoint, expanding there, but also across social. Even email marketing, we’re leaning into even more education. This consumer is hungry to understand. 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.
Healthy Baby is intentional about every single decision, both big and small. 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.
Chief Marketer: Previously, did Healthy Baby just do more performance marketing?
Gieskes: The business has leaned heavily on performance in the past, and performance is an important lever of a digital marketing mix. Performance works best, though, when it’s in concert with everything else. The mandate for the CMO is in large part to build awareness for the brand.
Chief Marketer: How do you find these shoppers who are only looking for these products within a certain window of time, and they’re probably not going to change once they decide, and then they don’t need your product anymore?
Gieskes: It’s funny because I think that sales and marketing are different. 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. And you’re right, if you are locked and loaded with your diaper company and your diaper subscription, you’re probably not going to go anywhere, and that’s OK. But there are plenty of people who don’t have that brand affinity. Maybe they are a couple months away from making a decision. Maybe they’re expecting, or they’re kind of teetering on the edge. They’re in a consideration space.
For me, it’s about disseminating this incredible message about this business in all the places that our consumer would be. We’ve previously sort of narrowly done that in that we’ve only had a few channels turned on. Right now, we’re turning on a multitude of channels. We’re testing and learning. We’re figuring out what message works for X person, what message works for Y person.
Chief Marketer: How has your background prepared you for this role?
Gieskes: What has been interesting about my marketing journey is that I started off in content, and that has informed a lot of my perspective. I worked at Conde Nast for several years. Actually, while I was at Conde Nast, I decided to make a shift. This was back in 2010. I felt that there was a bit of a Darwinian shakeout in the magazine space. It felt a little bit antiquated the way that print and digital were so separated. It was very church-and-state at the time, and I wanted to go somewhere that felt more modern and more at the forefront. That’s what brought me to Birchbox, and that was an incredible experience and also an education.
I started on the content team and saw the power of content and voice and how that can inform brand and brand differentiation. A lot of those lessons have stayed with me.
The other thing that was interesting about that company was we were incredibly authentic when it came to brand and voice. A lot of the beauty stuff that was out there at the time was from a sort of highbrow editorial lens. You were getting a lot of your beauty information from magazines. It was kind of at the advent of the blogger, and we had a different perspective than traditional beauty brands and editorial sites. That has really informed how I’ve approached marketing and how I’ve always seen it as an avenue to connect with the customer in a real way.
Chief Marketer: What have been some of the biggest shifts in the marketing industry over the past five years?
Gieskes: I feel like the iOS update was a big shift, and I can’t remember if that was five years ago or not, but the interesting thing about digital marketing is it’s changing all of the time. I’d say GEO is probably the first thing that comes to mind in the last two or three years that’s taken off. When I was talking previously about content, that’s a focus for us as well because people are increasingly using LLMs to research and, during that consideration phase, figure out which brand they want to go with.
Chief Marketer: The iOS update — that was when consumers could opt out of tracking. Is that what you’re referring to?
Gieskes: Exactly. That threw everyone for a loop. That was a tough time to be a performance marketer because suddenly things changed overnight. Obviously, all of these platforms are pay-to-play, but everything has just gotten more expensive, and it’s much harder to reach that core customer.
It’s [shown] marketers the value of diversification. You can’t have all of your eggs in one basket, nor should you, because you don’t own these platforms. They can change the rules at any given moment, and you can’t be beholden to any one place for your acquisition. It was a good forcing function, but definitely a major change and very painful at the time.
Chief Marketer: How has the CMO role evolved in the past few years?
Gieskes: CMOs are increasingly becoming storytellers. That’s always been the case, but I would say that there is more of a push. There’s so much information out there, and there’s so much choice out there; it really comes down to perspective. 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.
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. We have a meaningful and differentiated offer, voice and brand.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
