13 Years of Natural Baby Shower

Our birthday cake officially has 13 candles on it. This year marks 13 special years since Natural Baby Shower started and what an amazing journey it has been! What started as a simple idea formed from 1 mum’s strong passion, has grown into a leading online and high street independent retailer - loved and trusted by families around the world.

It has been one special adventure and we want to take a look back at the story of Natural Baby Shower to celebrate the milestones and special memories from throughout the years.

How it all started

The idea for Natural Baby Shower was inspired by the co-founders time living in New Zealand. Vics and Clifton welcomed their first son, Dylan, when they were living in New Zealand in 2003. They loved the natural and laid back approach to parenting that they experienced in New Zealand where everything had a focus on being best for the baby and parents, but also the environment.

When they returned home, Vics struggled to find similar products that she was used to in New Zealand in the UK nursery shops. She couldn’t find reusable nappies anywhere and very few retailers were dedicated to eco baby products in the UK. So through her own frustrations, Vics decided to fill the gap herself and set up a business that would cater to parents wanting products that encouraged the simple, natural and planet friendly approach to parenting that she loved.

The Kitchen Table

In 2007 Natural Baby Shower was officially open for business from their kitchen table. On this day all those years ago, the website was launched, and Natural Baby Shower received their first order from their first customer. Back then Vics and Clifton did everything themselves. Clifton used his programming experience to create and run the website, Vics used her passion and knowledge to go on the hunt for the best brands she could find that mirrored her mission. She fell in love with the brands she discovered, and some like TotsBots and Cuddledry have been with us from the very beginning and we still stock today. Together they shipped and packaged every order and continued to grow the business as they also juggled family life.

13 years on, they may have outgrown their kitchen table, but the company’s ethos and their passion has stayed the same.

NBS Store

In 2015 the doors to our lovely Bagshot store opened. It gave us the opportunity to finally meet our customers face to face and let them get hands on with our amazing products. In such a short space of time, our store has nearly tripled in size. It has 2 floors of parent and baby essentials, with downstairs being the perfect space to demo all our pushchairs and car seats, as well as browsing our changing bags, toys and organic clothing. Upstairs we have our gorgeous nursery showrooms with homely displays of all your nursery essentials. There is even a toddler area to keep little ones busy whilst you browse.

But that’s not all. We wanted our shop not only to be a place where people came to shop, but a space parents can come to meet other parents and learn about parenthood. With this as inspiration, we opened our parent and baby class space called The Hub. We use this space for a whole range of interactive parent and baby classes, events and talks open to the public.

Late 2018 we also welcomed Window to the Womb to our store to offer our customers a private 4D scanning service. These extra additions to our store mean we can offer our customers a versatile parenting destination in the local community and beyond.  

We moved to a new HQ

For a number of years the amazing Natural Baby Shower team were working hard behind the scenes in offices above our store. However, as the business grew and more team members joined the business, we quickly outgrew our offices above the store, so we went on the hunt for a new space to have as our office and warehouse HQ. This meant we could grow the store to offer even more space for parents to browse and shop, whilst giving our team more space to work and grow in bigger offices.

We found the perfect space in 2018 and the move was officially on! Our new Bracknell HQ offered the perfect mix of versatile and spacious office space for our team as well as having a larger warehouse facility on site where all our orders are lovingly picked, packed and sent out from. The new NBS HQ was our new home and we loved it!

New Website

2020 was the year for a mini makeover Natural Baby Shower style. In February, after months of hard work, we launched our new website and branding. We wanted to improve our website to bring our customers an even better and seamless shopping experience. We invested heavily in innovative, state of the art technology to help re-design our website with improved mobile shopping features, functionality, filtering, plus more information about the Natural Baby Shower story and our mission to help protect our amazing planet. The new website also allowed us to put a bigger emphasis on product information and our parent testing program to help customers shop with confidence.

The feedback was amazing and after months of hard work from the whole team it was amazing to see it all pay off. We may be biased, but we all loved the new website!

Awards

Our passion and mission has remained the same since the kitchen table and the whole team works tirelessly to bring our customers the very best products for families that also help protect our amazing planet. So, it is always amazing when we get recognised for our efforts and are lucky enough to be nominated and win awards.

Over the years we have been lucky enough to have won a number of special awards. We are so proud to have been acknowledged for our retailer excellence and trusted service, but also recognised for our positive social and environmental impact. Whilst every award means so much to us, some of our highlights include winning “Best Online Retailer” at the Baby Awards in 2019, 2 golds and 1 silver at the Online Nursery Awards, winner of the “Positive Social Impact” award at the Surrey Heath Business Awards and bronze at the Weaning Week Awards for "Best Online Retailer" in 2020. 

Here to help

Welcoming a new arrival is the most exciting and rewarding journey, and we are always so proud to help parents along the way and be there to support them through the adventure. It has always been our aim to help make parenting that little bit easier by providing parents with only the products that we genuinely love and trust ourselves. We are confident in our products and over the years we have gained quite a bit of expert training and knowledge to be able to help parents through their parenting journey.

We want to help use our platform to offer customers confidence, knowledge and information to help with purchasing decisions and not only be where people buy their products, but also where parents go for expert helpful advice. Through our blog, product information on the website, parent review program and our interactive and informative buying guides, we want to help parents navigate the sometimes confusing world of baby essentials.

Today

Today Natural Baby Shower is a leading independent retailer trusted by families around the world. We offer over 120 trusted and eco-friendly brands which is growing every day as we continue the hunt for new and exciting brands for our customers. What started life from a kitchen table with a team of 2 inspired individuals has grown to an amazing team of talented and passionate people of over 50 employees.

The companies mission and ethos hasn’t changed since day 1, and the whole team at Natural Baby Shower work to champion these values for our customers. Every order still means just as much to Vic’s and Clifton today as it did 13 years ago.

What’s next?

Today we are going to celebrate our 13th birthday, but once the candles have been blown out and the champagne bottles are empty we want to look to the future and keep getting better. So what’s next for Natural Baby Shower?

We have been supporting charities since the very beginning and are very proud to be supporting the amazing charities we work with. However, we want to make it a priority for the future to work even harder to make a difference and work collaboratively with even more special charities to help give back to those in need.

As a business that ships deliveries worldwide we are always faced with challenges in keeping our carbon footprint as small as possible. It is our mission for the future to work with our suppliers, delivery operators and internal team to make sure we operate our supply chain as green as we can and make improvements to help protect our special planet.

We want to be able to meet as many of our customers face to face as possible and reach new ones in even more areas. Our store is a special place for parents and everyone who visits loves the space we have created, so it is definitely our goal for the future to open more stores in the UK and bring Natural Baby Shower to more local communities.

And of course, the hunt for new and exciting products that offer something different and mirror our mission is always ongoing. Our commitment to make this planet a little greener and to providing parents with natural and sustainable baby products that are the very best for parents and babies, as well as the planet, continues. Cheers to the past 13 years of Natural Baby Shower, and to the next 13!