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Read time: 4 mins 33 seconds
Imagine this: you’ve just sold your baby food company for 9 figures. What would you do next?
Most people might travel the world or retire on a beach.
If you’re Jessica Rolph, you dive headfirst into a new problem.
After selling her baby food company, Happy Family, for over $250 million, Jessica quickly began her next venture: Lovevery.
As a new mom, she already knew everything about baby nutrition. However, when it came to her child’s learning and development, she felt lost. Her home was filled with the same plastic, flashing-light toys as everyone else’s, and she had a gut feeling they weren’t helping much.
That curiosity led her to a PhD thesis by Dr. William Staso, who argued that early learning isn’t about the toy but rather how a parent engages their child through simple, concept-based play.
Jessica learned that 90% of the human brain develops by age five and that flashy toys can actually reduce parent-child interaction and language development.
“I had this intuition that there was something more I could be giving my child to impact their future.”
That intuition became her new mission, one inspired by love for her children.
The basement years
In 2015, Jessica teamed up with her best friend's husband, Rod Morris, to start Lovevery.
They raised $2M in seed funding from friends, family, and investors.
Their vision was to create a system of development for the first five years of life, a complete program that would guide parents through their child's critical developmental windows.
It was a grand vision that required dozens of products across multiple age ranges. They needed to start somewhere.
The wedge = The Play Gym.
It was perfect. Every parent registers for one. It's a baby staple. But in 2015, every play gym on the market was the same: cheap plastic arches ($30-$50), small mats, stuffed animals dangling in the baby's face that didn't really do much.
Jessica saw an opportunity to reinvent the entire category, a premium product that would actually help with the child’s developmental process.
During the early days, Jessica would invite new moms into her basement to test competitors' products, then take them into a secret room to show them their own scrappy prototype.They traveled across the country with prototypes in tow, asking for brutal feedback.
The key innovation:
Wooden arches instead of soft fabric—higher, sturdier, more beautiful
Larger mat so babies could roll, sit up, and actually move
Five developmental zones that could be revealed over time (texture zone, visual zone, sound zone, object permanence zone)
Montessori-based design focused on concept learning, not overstimulation
A guide that taught parents how to play at each stage
The big bet was that parents would pay $140 for a developmental system instead of $40 for a cheap toy. They delayed the launch multiple times to get it right. It took them 17 months to make the first product launch ready.
Lovevery’s growth playbook
November 2017. The Play Gym launched on both Amazon and their own D2C site.
Rod set up Shopify notifications to make a "cha-ching" sound every time an order came in. They were nervous. They had their phones out, waiting.
Then it started.
🔔 Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Cha-ching.
Multiple orders in a 10-minute window. Then every few minutes. Then constantly.
"It was incredible to feel the product-market fit right away, the first day."
By the end of 2018, Lovevery had made nearly $7 million in revenue.
Within a year, their $140 Play Gym was the #1 selling play gym on Amazon by revenue, despite being 3x the price of everything else.
1/ First 1,000 customers
They got their first cohort of users from a mix of paid ads, organic growth, and pure hustle.
Instagram Ads:
They had some seed money to spend, and they went hard on Instagram. The product was beautiful, the brand was fresh, and there hadn't been a new toy brand in years. It resonated immediately.
Influencer Seeding:
Instead of paying for influencer sponsorship, they just gifted them products. They DM'd people on Instagram. One by one. Human to human.
"Would you be willing to accept this gift for your baby?"
Because it was new, beautiful, and genuinely innovative, even famous people said yes. Patrick Mahomes’s wife posted about it. For free.
The product was so good, people wanted to post about it.
2/ The subscription engine
The Play Gym was just the foot in the door.
The real vision was always The Play Kits, a subscription program that delivers age-appropriate, research-backed toys every 2-3 months from birth to age 5.
In 2018, they launched the first year of Play Kits. It was a massive hit.
Then customers started aging out. "Can you do this for one-year-olds?" "What about two-year-olds?"
They spent the next few years catching up, developing kits for ages 1, 2, 3, 4. Each age range took 1-2 years to develop properly. They had to balance speed with quality.
Today, they have 650K customers across 34 countries, with subscriptions contributing to around 70% of the total revenue.
One-time toy sales are nice. Recurring revenue from birth to age 5 is a BUSINESS.
3/ The retail gauntlet
Jessica wanted to be everywhere parents shop: Amazon, Target, Walmart.
It wasn’t easy getting into big-box retail.
Price was the main tension point. Target was worried that $140 was too expensive for their typical guest. They weren't sure it would sell…
To make retailers feel more comfortable with the product, Jessica and Rod kept building their brand via D2C. They kept building brand awareness and making customers fall in love with Lovevery.
By the time they went back to Target in a couple of years, customers were already asking for it. Target finally said yes!
2019: The Play Gym launched on Target.com
2021: Exclusive collection of playthings for Target in-stores.
2024: The Play Gym and The Looker Play Kit available in every Target store nationwide.
2025: Launched in Walmart with a new-to-market collection. Released The Mini Kits new collection at Target.
It was a great success, but getting in was just the beginning.
Once they were in retail, a new challenge emerged: timelines.
D2C gave them 2.5 years to develop a deep product-market fit, with lots of testing, iteration, room to fail and go back to the drawing board. Retail was a different beast.
"In 12 months, we're going to have this opportunity. Present it. Then we'll wait 3-4 months to tell you what we want. Then you have 8 months to make it happen. It's very difficult to balance direct-to-consumer priorities with retailer priorities."
To navigate this challenge, they moved quickly by pitching the collection to retail at the same time they were conducting testing with early prototypes. They held on-site testing with 28 different families. This allowed their product team to incorporate customer feedback early-on in the creation process in order to fine tune all the design elements.
Most importantly, they don't compromise on quality to hit deadlines. If it doesn't meet their standards, it doesn't ship.
4/ Current traction
$226M in 2023 revenue
$132M in total funding, including a $100M Series C round led by The Chernin Group
40M+ playthings shipped to date
10M+ books sold to date
180+ employees across Boise (HQ), Amsterdam, and Hong Kong
Key lessons from Lovevery's journey
1/ Seed influencers through pure hustle: Lovevery got Brittany Mahomes to post for free by literally sliding into their DMs. One by one. Rihanna even became a follower and was gifted products. If your product is genuinely innovative and beautiful, you can build an unpaid influencer army through grit.
2/ Premium pricing needs a story: Jessica and her team made the play gym research-backed, Montessori-based, and Instagram-beautiful. They educated parents on why flashing toys reduce engagement and why developmental zones matter. The $140 price was for a system that impacts 90% of your child's brain development by age 5.
3/ Launch with what people already buy, then upsell the vision: The Play Gym was a Trojan horse. Everyone registers for one. It's a proven category. They used it to build trust and awareness, then expanded into the real business: Play Kits subscriptions (Around 70% of revenue today).
4/ Build D2C demand before you need retail distribution: Target said no for years because they worried about price. Lovevery invested resources in building D2C brand power first. By the time they went back to retailers, customers were already asking for the products.
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See you next Tuesday,
Leo
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