Admin Apr 8, 2019 9:37:18 AM 3 min read

Meet the 2019 Spring Cohort: Ellie + Ott

Ellie + Ott

Ellie + Ott is changing how parents learn about their baby’s development. Our books, playtime activity ideas, and parent skill-building strategies are based on developmental and behavioral science and designed to grow with your family.

Tell us the story of how and why you started your company.

We created Ellie + Ott about nine months ago with the intention of making early-stage parenting a little more enjoyable. To help parents understand their baby's development a little better, we distilled all of the literature into bite-size chunks, grouped them by months, and went one step further by providing playtime activity ideas for parents to take action on this information. We also learned early on that parenting support was not widely available, so we created strategies geared around a different mode (think: SurvivalMode, BeastMode, ChillMode) for parent's to focus on each month. And to bring our namesake characters to life, we wrote and illustrated baby books to accompany each month's playtime activities and parent skills! We started from the ground up on these books, taking into account developmental milestones, real-life scenarios, and infusing as much fun as we could into them! Together, these products give parents a month-by-month playbook on engaging with their baby and honing their parenting chops. Ellie + Ott is supported by myself, our illustrator, Helen, and our resident developmental psychologist, Sharon.

What's your most recent success or milestone hit?

Our most recent success is getting our first set of products (our first three months) in hand in early April! We'll officially launch sales April 15th and hope to roll out the next nine months by the end of August.

Where do you see your startup in 1 year?

In one year I see Ellie + Ott launching retail partnerships while we expand our merchandising line and roll out the 12-24 month products.