Instead, we launched into adult sleep believing our brand would carry over. But we quickly learned that brand loyalty had to be earned all over again. Adult buyers who’d never had a baby had no reason to know us. The product had to stand on its own merit. Here’s the framework I wish someone had handed me.

The question isn’t “Can we reach more people?”

Most brand expansion conversations start in the wrong place. Founders look at market size and growth maps. That’s all useful. But the more important question is simpler and harder to answer: Does this new strategy make sense coming from us specifically?

If the expansion requires you to become a different company, that’s a red flag. If it requires you to become more of the company you already are, that’s a green light.

We didn’t start our expansion with market research. We started with our mission. Nearly a decade of helping babies sleep has shaped a core belief: that what makes sleep work—environment, consistency, a reliable routine—doesn’t change based on age.

The adult sleep market was growing rapidly, and we realized we had something real to offer it. Not only because the market was big, but because the problem was the same one we’d been solving all along: sleep.

Let your customers lead

Founders should pay attention to customer behaviour.

Our customers showed us what they wanted before we even offered it. We found that nearly 25 percent of parents who bought a device for their nursery then bought a second unit for themselves. For them, the device’s value proposition didn’t stop at the nursery door, even though we weren’t marketing the device for adults.

When customers are already taking the action you’re considering, you’re not taking a risk—you’re catching up. The market is telling you something and you should listen.

The core value must be strong

Here’s the failure mode I see most often: Founders expand the brand before the original business is truly solid, because growth pressure demands something new. A new product line, a new segment, a new channel. The original strategy then gets less investment, less attention, and slowly stops being the best version of itself.

We needed to earn our place in the adult market the same way we earned it in the nursery—by solving the problem better than anyone else.

The discipline to stay put until you’re genuinely ready is one of the hardest things in brand-building. Growth pressure is relentless. Investors want to see new facets of the business. The industry rewards expansion announcements more than focusing on getting the core right.

I would urge you to resist that pressure. Your brand equity is your most durable asset. Stretching into spaces you haven’t earned yet chips away at what you’ve already built. And brand equity, unlike revenue, is slow to rebuild.

3 questions to consider

If you’re weighing an expansion right now, here are three questions worth sitting with first:

1. Can you articulate the expansion in a single sentence that doesn’t require an asterisk? If you need to caveat it—”we’re sort of entering X, for a specific kind of customer who also does Y”—the story isn’t clear enough yet. Clear expansion stories are ones you can say out loud without wincing.
2. Can you tell the difference between genuine customer pull and vocal-minority noise? A handful of loud requests aren’t a signal. Sustained behaviour—customers buying more, using the product in ways you didn’t design for, asking the same question at scale—is.
3. What are you protecting by staying put, and what are you risking by not moving? This one is often skipped. Knowing when not to expand is just as strategic as knowing when to press go.

We moved from nurseries to nightstands not because we were done with babies, but because we understood that sleep is sleep, and that the families we’d already helped could receive more from us than we’d originally imagined.

The brand didn’t change. It grew up. And we think that’s the only kind of expansion worth doing.