Mylo

When we first met David and Luisa Scacchetti, the husband and wife team behind Mamas & Papas, the brand was well-known as a premium, parenting retailer, with a growing network of stores around the UK. But it had an exciting opportunity to expand beyond its retail roots, by growing its export business. That’s where we came in. Its growth strategy was focused on launching its very own flagship product – a baby travel system that showcased the brand to a global audience.

A pushchair has two main types of users, the parents and the baby. We soon realised that most pushchairs were designed with the parents’ needs, rather than the baby’s, at the forefront. We needed a genuine point of difference based on Mamas & Papas priority of - ‘comfort for the baby’. So we turned conventional thinking on its head and created Mylo; a parent-friendly system that put baby’s comfort first. Super collapsible and baby-cosseting, its distinctive, head-turning looks perfectly captured the spirit of the Mamas & Papas brand and quickly grabbed the industry’s attention. As a direct result of Mylo’s launch, Mamas & Papas gained six new distributors in six new geographical markets globally, and that just was in its first six months. Those parents who bought it, loved it, many taking to parenting sites, such as Mumsnet, to lavish the pushchair with five-star reviews.

From the beginning, the bar was set high for this pushchair. Our brief was to create a new innovative baby transport system. User research showed us that to have real impact with parents, the system had to be easier and more intuitive to use than other pushchair designs on the market, while balancing comfort for the baby. For Mamas & Papas, this meant the mechanism needed to fold with and without the seat in place and allow the baby to face both forwards and backwards. The whole thing also needed to collapse with a simple one-handed flourish and fit in the boot of a car. Visually, it needed to leap-out in a crowded, global market with a unique aesthetic that was instantly recognisable as Mamas & Papas.

The comfort of the baby quickly came to define our whole design strategy. We put aside the existing ‘meccano’ visual language of pushchairs and looked instead at more biomorphic, simple, ergonomic comfort of Scandinavian furniture design. Our design and engineering team worked iteratively, creating a series of prototypes that were constantly user-evaluated and improved. Mamas & Papas was delighted with the final design: a flagship pushchair that won it that prized, front-of-store position in major multi-brand stores around the world. Mylo became the brand ambassador we all intended, firmly positioning Mamas & Papas overseas as an exciting and innovative brand.