Who is Cecilia?

Meet Cecilia Tsai, Founder of MiaMily!

About MiaMily

Founded by Cecilia and her husband Alessandro, MiaMily is a family brand that hopes to eliminate any frustrations that families come across as their children grow older. The company’s first product was the HIPSTER PLUS, a hip seat baby carrier designed to take the pressure off your baby so you can comfortably carry your little one. Since then, the company has expanded into travel products, releasing an ergonomic ride on suitcase that can hold up to 220 pounds and make traveling easier. MiaMily continues to innovate and release new products that serve families through and through.

Cecilia’s Journey

MiaMily began in 2014 and started as a personal need. Cecilia was holding Mia, her first child,with the wrong posture and pinched a nerve in her back. She immediately went out and bought every type of baby carrier in the market and discovered that all of them made her back pain worse. Cecilia then learned that it was possible that a baby carrier can be great for babies, but not ergonomic for the mother holding them. 

Crafting the Company

She then called her uncle, who lives in China and has his own factory, hoping that he could find a baby carrier factory for her. Not long after, she created the first MiaMily baby carrier.

Cecilia shopped and traveled around with her prototype, and people would stop her and ask where she bought it from. At the time, the carrier was purely for her own use, but she realized that there was a demand in ergonomic, fully-functional baby carriers.

Cecilia used to work in L.A. as a producer. When she and her family were visiting friends, she called up her old crew members and produced a one-minute video. The budding team went to Kickstarter and debuted their new hip seat baby carrier concept. With just one prototype, they sold almost 1,000 baby carriers to 33 countroes. This immediate success gave Cecilia and her husband the confidence to start the business.

The company gets its name from a combination of the names Mia and Emily. Although Cecilia and Alessandro say that the name comes from their two daughters, Mia and Emily, Emily, the couple’s second daughter was born after the company was founded. In actuality, Emily was a second name choice for Mia.

She and Alessandro now have three children — Mia and Emily, and a son, Noah.

Pivoting to E-commerce

MiaMily started in retail and was very lucky during its first year, Cecilia explains. The company’s products were sold in stores like Toys ‘R Us, Buy Buy Baby, Walmart, and Target. Overall, 70% of MiaMily’s revenue was through retail, and 30% was from D2C.

When COVID hit, the team had to pivot fast and decided to go fully D2C. They stopped retail marketing and completely restructured the company. Cecilia and Alessandro rebuilt the website with Shopify. Because stores were closed, retailers stopped ordering, and as a result, the MiaMily team used Instagram to leverage customers and purchases.

Cecilia posted a lot about her family and personal life and garnered loyal supporters, who were usually parents who agreed with Cecilia and her husband’s parenting style.

As the world was opening back up, MiaMily dropped a luggage product line, which performed very well, considering that most people were itching to travel.

Now, e-commerce is the company’s strongest asset. When it comes to revenue, D2C is 70% and retail comes in at 30% — the numbers flipped over time.

The MiaMily Team

The MiaMily team is lean on purpose, Cecilia explains. From day one, they always worked remote because, at the time, everyone on the team had young children. Cecilia and Alessandro understood the need to be flexible and work around everyone’s schedule. In the past, the team would meet once a week in the office and conduct Skype calls when needed.

Over time, personal Skype chats weren’t as efficient, so the team began working asynchronously and would only set up call if someone on the team is needed. 

This set-up helped the team get through COVID without any major issues. 

Currently, the team is made up of five people. Cecilia handles production and marketing, Alessandro manages business development, sales distribution and logistics, a Customer Experience Manager who handles all CX correspondence, a marketing director, and an accountant.

Cecilia’s uncle’s company does some offshore work for MiaMily by handling suppliers, production and quality inspection.

The CX Philosophy at MiaMily

At MiaMily, the customer always comes first. The company makes an effort to accommodate the customer’s needs. The team offers repairs without charge, and if a customer has a trip coming up and needs their shipment quicker than regular shipping, the team will provide express shipping without asking the customer to pay.

Overall, the customer needs to feel like they are #1 while shopping at MiaMily.

“I really believe that having good customer service can win or break your company,” she says. “We really want to make the customer feel like they're the reason why we're here.”

Evolution of Customer Service

Since the beginning, MiaMily has believed that the customer is always right. When the company started, Cecilia was doing customer service. Sometimes, customers can be a little “spicy” in their emails, she explains, and at the time being a pregnant and hormonal woman , she was speaking to other hormonal women — which wasn’t really the best combination so. Alessandro took over customer experience and was very cool-headed about it. As the company began to grow in popularity and more tickets came in, it became too much for the couple to handle. They hired someone to take on a full-time CX position to help. 

Currently, only one person handles MiaMily’s customer service requests, and that due to our viral reels on Instagram, the business scaled really quickly and it can be an overwhelming task for one person to take on, Cecilia explains.

As a founder, and having worked in customer service, Cecilia understood that a good customer service could make or break a company so as more customers became interested in Miamily, the emails increased exponentially, Cecilia felt it was the right moment to bring on  TalentPop to enhance their CX team.

Fostering Innovation

The company’s innovation comes from the personal needs of the founders. For instance, they started their luggage line because they realized traveling with young children can be stressful so they found a solution to solve this pain point.

“Our (Innovation) is always inspired by  a personal need, discovering pain points, and then finding a solution,” Cecilia says. “If you can identify a problem and create a product to solve it, , then the rest is marketing. ”

MiaMily’s Growth Strategies

When it comes to strategizing growth, a lot of MiaMily’s reels went viral when they launched. From her experience, Cecilia has seen that social media can really help the brand  expand globally. 

For instance, there was a time when their  reels went viral in Kuwait. It created a huge demand in the local market and attracted distributors to the brand and it helped MiaMily enter that market. 

“There is definitely power in being active on social media because it can make your product global really fast. Once it goes viral in a certain market, distributors come knocking because they see the demand in their local market,” she says, “and then one thing leads to another.”

MiaMily also uses organic influencers — people who are genuinely interested in the brand and promote its products. In January, the company’s slow season, one influencer’s reel reached 270 million views. The natural boost in popularity tripled the company’s sales.

Prioritizing Customer Retention

The company is seeing more retention now as we gain trust and loyality from our customers, Cecilia says. During the company’s first year, people were still getting to know our newly luanched luggage, so they would only purchase one luggage  and we noticed they would come back an purchase a second luggage few months later.

These days, MiaMily is seeing more  first time orders with two suitcases because customers are sharing through word of mouth and building credibility in MiaMily’s products. The company’s luggage can support up to 220 pounds, which can be incredibly helpful even for adults while traveling. Once the customers realize this, they purchase a luggage for every family member.

Peak-Season Strategies

During the peak travel season, customer service is key. Delay can happen during peak season and it’s so important to be transparent and notify customers of possible delays. This way even if a customer’s package is delayed, they feel cared for and it builts trust in the brand.

To manage pre-orders, they use an app called Purple Dot. On the app, customers can pre-order products with no charge, and it has a great system to update customers on their pre-order. With customer service. If there’s a delay in shipment, the CX professional can segment a group of customers and email them all in one go — making it efficient to provide excellent service.

Elevating to the Next Level

MiaMily is transitioning into a travel brand, Cecilia says. In the future, the company wants to focus on products that make trave easier and fun.  Soon, the company will launch a backpack, tote travel bag, and weekender bag collections to offer everything that a customer needs when they travel.

Advice for Entrepreneurs

Cecilia advises other entrepreneurs not to overthink or be a perfectionist. If you have a great product idea, take the first step and try to sell that product to the people around you.  It’s imporant to do this step to understand if there is even a demand for you product.   She believes during the start up phase of any business, it’s about survival and every dollar should go toward making that next sale.  Once you can prove there is a demand, then you can consider patenting your idea.  

Cecilia and Alessandro took everything one step at a time when they began MiaMily. They didn’t create a business planuntil a year when they started looking for investors. . They had patented their product, but when the copy cats arrived, they realized that it costs a lot of money to fight copycats, so instead of going to court, they decided to dedicate their resources in creating more innovative products and in building their brand name. They believe that if brand marketing is done well, customers will pick you over buying a no name copycat.  It’s all about innovation.

“We really bootstrapped our business and there wasn’t a lot of funding to do everything. It was all one step at a time. It’s impossible to perfect that business plan and it's impossible to make that perfect website because once you launch it and people start buying, there's going to be feedback,” she says. “You can only really tweak your brand when it's running."