Bonsie Skin to Skin Babywear was born from a mother’s love for her children.
The idea for the company came shortly after Anna Turcotte, a clinical social worker working with families and children in the area of attachment, gave birth to her first child. She found it difficult to repeatedly dress and undress her newborn, Crew, for skin-to-skin bonding while also keeping him warm in frigid Maine.
“We looked around and saw that nobody had a product that was easy for skin-to-skin contact,” said Turcotte. “The idea kind of lived in the back of my mind for a few years. Two years later I had my daughter, Willa, and then decided, ‘alright, still nobody’s done it,’ so I came up with a prototype and launched the business.”
Bonsie Skin to Skin Babywear sells footies, baby bag sets and cuddle sacks, all designed to make skin-to-skin contact easy. The products are fitted with innovative hook and loop fasteners to make it “as easy as possible” for parents to dress babies without waking them. The company launched with Amazon in 2020, and soon after, Turcotte said, “we realized we had a brand that might go somewhere.”
Since then, Bonsie has tripled its sales with Amazon and is on track to generate $350,000 in sales in 2024. The company employs a team of four—including Anna’s husband Joseph—to support product design, media relations and order fulfillment, which is currently done in-house.
Turcotte said that transitioning to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is an important part of the company’s growth strategy in 2024.
“We’ve heard from a variety of different other brands that sell in the Amazon store that you’ll see a large increase in sales with moving to Fulfillment by Amazon,” she said. “And you get that Prime tag on your products that I think a lot of people trust, myself included, because we just shop Prime products.”
Bonsie also has its sights set on expanding to new customers in Canada.
“Amazon will be the first channel [for international sales]; we’ll start there because Amazon has it all set up,” Turcotte said. “Amazon has fulfillment figured out and they’ve got the languages figured out, so it just seems like a really easy first step to test the market.”
In addition to educating new parents about the importance of skin-to-skin contact through their products, Bonsie partners with a number of organizations whose mission it is to support new mothers and fathers.
Locally, they donate products to the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital in Portland, Maine, with the goal of gifting every new parent at the hospital a Bonsie to remind them “that the practice of skin-to-skin goes beyond the hospital setting,” Turcotte said.
They also support Welcome Baby, USA, a nonprofit that provides low-income families with newborn essentials at no cost, including diapers, baby carriers, bottles, baby thermometers and onesies.
“New moms don’t just need more time with their babies; they also need equitable access to resources and essential supplies,” Turcotte said. “Protecting the precious, fleeting time that new moms need with their babies is essential to the wellbeing of our communities. If we want to take better care of our world, we must first take better care of mothers.”