Not Your Mother’s Maternity Wear: Rosie Pope Maternity & MomPrep

Rosie Pope has her hands full. Not only is she growing her booming business, Rosie Pope Maternity, into a multi-faceted lifestyle brand, but she is also raising an expanding family. She launched her business around the time her son, James (“JR”), was born two years ago and since then, the maternity-wear brand has expanded to include MomPrep, a contemporary school for expecting parents— blocks away from their storefront on the Upper East Side. In March 2011, the company will be the subject of a new Bravo reality show, “Pregnant in Heels;” ironically, just a month after Rosie’s due date for her second child. 

The show will introduce the brand, popular with New York City moms, to the rest of the country. In anticipation of going from a regional to a national market, Rosie, the creative director, and her husband, the company’s CEO, Daron are preparing their company for the anticipated growth. 

Conception 

When Rosie started to shop for maternity wear, she noticed inadequacy in the maternity-wear industry—even in a cosmopolitan city, like Manhattan. “The maternity industry at large is an incredibly underserved industry, but yet, being a mother and celebrity moms are huge hot topics that people are into,” Rosie says. “It was amazing to me that I lived in this most amazing city, and yet every single person I met who was pregnant was dissatisfied by the services out there.” 

Rosie Pope Maternity has a storefront that carries her line of maternity wear that she designs, and according to Rosie, serving as designer, manufacturer, and retailer for her products has several advantages to designing and wholesaling. When selling designs wholesale to boutiques, “it’s very hard to know how those dresses that somebody bought in Pennsylvania are really working with the customer,” Rosie says. “What sets us apart from other labels, aside from the style, fit, and fabric of our clothes, is we’re just not willing to say ‘Oh, clients will buy our stuff because they have no other options.’ That’s such a failure in this industry.”

Based on feedback and requests she receives when interacting with customers in her store, Rosie makes changes and improvements to her lines. In her designs, Rosie not only leverages her experience with the physicality of being pregnant, but she also references the experience of being a mom-to-be in the services their company provides. “In the store, every day is a baby shower,” Daron says. “Everything from the candy we offer to the music we play to the way the store feels sets it apart. Our customers have said, ‘This is the cool maternity place.’” By creating this positive atmosphere, the duo has been able to utilize “word-of-mom” marketing to keep growing their customer base. 

Creating New Revenue Streams 

Rosie also saw an opportunity to embrace what she calls “the era of educated parents”—where moms and dads want to make decisions for their families, instead of relying on the doctor’s orders. “Today, people are really interested in making their own decisions about how they raise their children, how they’re pregnant; before they weren’t able to make those choices,” Rosie says. “It used to be you just go in and a nurse would tell you ‘It’s this way’, and then you’d be scared not to do it that way. It’s not like that now.”

As a result, Rosie Pope Maternity branched out in 2010 and created MomPrep, a school offering curricula, classes, and one-on-one training. By launching MomPrep, Rosie was able to tap into another missing component in her industry. “Moms don’t want to just learn about how painful labor is going to be,” Rosie says. “They also want to learn about how to decorate their nursery, how to take better pictures of their children, and fitness. And until now, that wasn’t just offered in one place.” 

Reality of Running a Company 

Through MomPrep, the company also offers a “pregnancy concierge” service that can do everything from setting up birthing classes to designing personalized dresses for the stages of pregnancy –including the day a woman gives birth. This service bore Rosie and Daron’s new reality show, “Pregnant in Heels,” which will debut on the Bravo network this spring. Just being a guest on an episode of Bravo’s “Bethenny Getting Married?” for a minute and a half gave them a substantial spike in website traffic. In addition to preparing for the invasion into their personal life, Rosie and Daron are also prepping their business for the anticipated boom.

The show will take Rosie Pope Maternity from being a New York company to a national business, and their day-to-day operations will have to change to meet the challenges and opportunities this exposure will bring. Currently, Daron oversees the financial and technical side of running the business and Rosie deals with designing the clothes, running the store, and managing MomPrep.