At a Glance

Founded in 2020, Bird&Be Co. offers products to men and women that allow them to get from conception through pregnancy and postpartum needs.

Who is Breanna Hughes?

Meet Breanna Hughes, co-founder of Bird&Be Co.

About Bird&Be Co.

Bird&Be Co. is an at-home, direct-to-consumer fertility company that’s designed to help families grow to and through parenthood. With products available for both men and women, they offer products that can help people all the way from conception through pregnancy and even postpartum needs and ongoing hormonal maintenance.

Three fertility doctors; a reproductive endocrinologist and two naturopathic fertility doctors, were part of the founding team, along with Breanna and her co-founders. This allowed them to gain even more insight and ensure that they were using the existing knowledge of the field.

Breanna’s own personal experience and her user research of over a thousand people to find out what their pain points and experiences with infertility helped them to get started. It allowed her to realize that one of the biggest problems facing those in the depths of infertility was supplement confusion and the overall cost of them.

When she told the doctors on their team that this was the most important point and gave them carte blanche to formulate the supplement. It took months to create a customer compound and then they sent it out to customers to let them offer feedback. They looked for insight on the taste, the smell, the tolerance, the number of pills required, and everything else about the product to decide on a future for it.

What they found was that the initial product included an ingredient that customers didn’t want and weren’t likely to take, because it smelled terrible. That meant taking another look at things, going back to the drawing board, doing even more R&D and eventually coming out with a product that worked.

Breanna’s experience in agile software development actually helped with this process, showing her what she could do to make sure the physical product was what people really wanted before it ever made it to market.

Following the rules of Health Canada, where Bird&Be, Co. products are produced, can take some time, since they are extremely strict, but Breanna actually likes that. Because the products they create are being used by those who are pregnant and trying to conceive, she believes it’s essential that their products are safe and effective. In fact, she thinks it’s so important that they’re using the same restrictions and rules from Canada in their US manufacturing, even though it’s not required.

Breanna’s Journey

Where did it all start? For Breanna, Bird&Be, Co. came about as a result of her own infertility experiences. At the time, she had spent years as the head of product at several different companies and most recently in a health tech company. She was also going through a five-year infertility journey and was trying to work through the trauma associated with the experience.

At the same time as she was making millions of other people healthier, Breanna was experiencing infertility, recurring pregnancy loss, three rounds of IVF, four embryo transfers, and multiple miscarriages. It was an extremely difficult time for her and she struggled with the contradictions of her work life and her personal life.

She decided to create her own company that would help others who were experiencing much the same things that she was, and just three days before her launch she learned that her latest embryo transfer was a success. Even more amazing, just one year later she conceived spontaneously and is now the mother of two amazing children.

The Team at Bird&Be, Co.

Founded during COVID, Bird&Be, Co. started entirely remote and continues to be remote even to this day. What that means is the team is located throughout North America, including Toronto, New York, BC, and LA.

Because they are remote it’s been possible to hire the best people for the job rather than being limited by geography. And keeping things remote also means the team can travel or go wherever they want and still get their work done.

How many people does this include? It’s actually still quite a small team with only 15 full-time employees with the added assistance of agencies and contractors.

Business Growth and Revenue Strategies

The most important thing from the very start? Solve a problem. That’s what Breanna was looking for when it came to creating Bird&Be, Co. She knew that it was important to listen to people and understand their problems and then solve them. That’s what it really takes to build a business, finding a need and solving it.

Customer Retention and Churn at Bird&Be, Co.

In most businesses customer retention is crucial and they are always looking for ways to keep their customers coming back. At Bird&Be, Co. there is a slightly different objective.

While they do appreciate having return customers and keeping people coming back, they also know that customers being done with their products can mean that they are done having children. That means Bird&Be, Co. would have been successful in helping them achieve their goal.

Bird&Be, Co. does look at retention, but they don’t gamify the way other companies do because they know that retention means that it’s a sign that they’re having more health concerns or that they’re struggling to conceive. Contrary to their own level of customer retention and success, they actually look at ways to shorten the cycle for their customers and to find better opportunities for them.

Planning the Future of Bird&Be, Co.

What does the future look like for Bird&Be, Co.? Breanna’s mission is to help as many people as possible, and one way she’d love to do that is by celebrating as many babies born and successful pregnancies as possible. Expanding the reach of the company and the number of people that they can help is essential, especially with more underserved markets.

The truth is that even in metropolitan cities, fertility care can be quite low. There are millions of women who are not geographically in an area where they can get fertility care. Breanna would love to be able to reach out to those communities, and expand the level of support that they have access to.

Breanna herself knows how it feels to be outside of that zone because getting fertility care for herself meant driving six hours to the closest clinic. But she doesn’t want that for anyone else. That’s why Bird&Be, Co. is so important. It helps people to get the access to products that they might not otherwise even know about let alone actually have the ability to get for themselves.

With infertility rates on the rise due to factors that range from smoking and alcohol use in males to increased age of first trying to conceive to even environmental factors, it’s even more important to get these products out there and available to as many people as possible, and especially in rural areas that don’t have easy access to fertility clinics. With research showing that every month 80% of people who are trying to conceive will fail, people are searching for anything that could help increase their chances.

Bird&Be, Co.’s CX Philosophy 

Bird&Be, Co. focuses on one simple customer experience philosophy, ‘are we making our customers’ lives easier?’

One of the biggest benefits that the company has for customers is that they are doing everything they can to remove the pain, time, turmoil, stress, and anxiety of trying to conceive, pregnancy, and postpartum. They’re looking to take the burden off of customers as much as possible and that includes a great deal of care and attention.

The company has just implemented a new return process that makes it much easier for customers to return products, without having to contact the customer service team. Even though the numbers aren’t so good for Bird&Be, Co. and the cost of processing the returns is not cost-effective using a return platform, Breanna knows that it’s easier for the customer that way.

Why? Because sometimes it’s difficult for customers to reach out to customer service and talk to them about the problem or the reason that they are returning the product. With this type of return process, it relieves even more of the burden off the customer.

‍