Investment Banking Elite Quits to Make Diapers, Leveraging "Subtraction" to Drive $160 Million in Annual Revenue!

Each generation has its own consumption logic. Follow the current young people's needs and thinking, try reverse positioning, and you may find the root cause of sluggish sales:Most likely, you got your target audience wrong from the start.

Take infant diapers as an example. The industry has long formed a fixed perception that diapers are baby products, defaulting to treating babies as the core service target.

Image source: Coterie

But the reality is that infants are too young to perceive the quality of a product, let alone express their true user experience.The ones who truly judge whether a diaper is good and hold the purchasing decision power are actually the baby's parents.

It is they who change diapers for their children day after day. Pain points such as softness, hypoallergenic qualities, and outstanding absorption are all personally felt by the parents.

Once you understand this, the idea of reverse positioning becomes clear. A brand selling diapers ostensibly serves babies, but in essence it relieves the parenting anxiety of the new generation of parents. Therefore, starting from the emotional pain points of parents makes it easier to move consumers.

Today we are going to talk aboutCoterie, which is a representative case that has fully grasped this logic.

It takes relieving parents' parenting anxiety as its entry point and has long been deeply cultivating compostable eco-friendly diapers.In its fourth year of establishment, it had sold a cumulative total of 150 million diapers; in 2024, its full-year revenue reached $160 million, and active subscribers surpassed 120,000.

Now, let's analyze together: How did Coterie become a hit in Europe and America in just a few years, and what strategies were behind it?

Image source: Coterie

Finding the 'spenders': A reverse insight from an investment banker

According to public information, the Coterie brand was officially born in New York, USA in 2019.

One of the co-founders, Frank Yu, was a top investment banker. During his frequent business trips to Japan, he deeply experienced the core advantages of high-end Japanese diapers: soft, skin-friendly materials and excellent absorbency, with a user experience far superior to North American local products.

After returning to the US market, he found that mainstream products on the market generally had pain points such as rough materials and frequent leakage, and high-end diapers that combined softness, comfort, and high absorbency were a market gap.

Image source: Google

After targeting this gap, Frank invested $1 million of his own funds in 2016 to start the project. After refinement, the Coterie brand, focusing on the high-end maternal and infant market, was officially launched in 2019.

The product features a fragrance-free, hypoallergenic, thickened and soft outer layer, perfectly fitting the wearing needs of babies with sensitive skin. At the same time, it continues to deeply cultivate the environmental protection track, developing degradable and compostable eco-friendly diapers, aligning with the current green, low-carbon consumption concept and lifestyle trends.

In addition, the absorption capacity of the brand's core product is about 70% higher than traditional diapers, completely solving the parenting problem of parents frequently getting up at night to change diapers. With these differentiated hardcore selling points, it quickly accumulated its first batch of loyal users.

Image source: Google

Deepening the independent site: Using a subscription model to drive DTC private-domain growth

Given the high costs of entering traditional supermarkets and their inability to fully convey brand philosophy or showcase core product advantages, Coterie established a differentiated channel strategy from its inception, making its self-built overseas independent website the sole launch sales channel.

Unlike the retail model of ordinary brand independent sites, Coterie leveraged diapers' category characteristics as a high-frequency necessity with continuous consumption, implementing a DTC subscription model upon the launch of its first product, The Diaper, and offering a $95 monthly diaper subscription package.

Through this subscription model tailored to the long-term consumption characteristics of maternal and infant products, users' repurchase intention has been significantly enhanced.

Image source: Coterie

Completing the Channel Landscape: Harvesting Traffic from Private to Public Domains

To further broaden its user base and tap into incremental markets, Coterie has gradually expanded into diverse sales channels while deeply cultivating its private domain on its independent site.

It first joined mainstream third-party e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, launching single-pack spot sales to precisely meet the needs of consumers who don't want to be tied to subscription services, filling gaps in its sales channels.

Image source: Amazon

At the same time, Coterie has also precisely positioned itself in maternal and infant vertical traffic channels, entering baby gift registry platforms such as Babylist and Zola, as well as online wedding service platforms, to precisely reach core potential customer groups such as families preparing for pregnancy and expecting childbirth, continuously expanding the brand's user landscape.

Betting on TikTok: Igniting Social Virality Through Real Experiences

Of course, if you want to keep breaking into new circles and reaching more families with babies and young children, the core still lies in brand-led content seeding and word-of-mouth communication.

Based on this logic, Coterie has deeply invested in visual content marketing across major social platforms, creating massive exposure opportunities for the brand.

Especially through the immersive dissemination of TikTok short videos, users can intuitively perceive product advantages while scrolling through videos, subtly enhancing their brand recognition and purchase intention.

1. Official account subtly conveys brand value.

To accurately convey the brand philosophy and directly address the parenting anxiety pain points of new-generation parents, the brand's official account @Coterie focuses on authentic daily parenting content, spotlighting real product usage experiences in parent-child scenarios.

The content published by the account abandons hard advertising and avoids deliberately piling up marketing visuals such as product replacements and feature introductions. Instead, it conveys the brand's core advantages through warm parent-child daily moments and real usage scenarios, softly communicating the product's skin-friendly, hypoallergenic, easy-to-use, worry-free, and eco-sustainable features, while highlighting the brand's core value of freeing parents' hands and alleviating parenting stress.

Image source: TikTok

High-quality native content has built a solid fan base for the brand. Currently, Coterie's official account has gained 45,800 followers, with total likes exceeding 267,800.

This subtle, imperceptible content dissemination approach continuously builds user goodwill, fosters a positive brand reputation, and lays a solid foundation for conversions and traffic generation.

Image source: TikTok

2.Niche vertical influencers achieve high efficiency.Break out of the circle.

To precisely reach core consumer groups and acquire customers efficiently, Coterie has long focused on collaborations with maternal and infant influencers.

Unlike most brands that focus their investment on top- and mid-tier influencers, this brand adopted a differentiated strategy of broadly engaging niche vertical influencers, prioritizing maternity and baby care creators with smaller followings but highly targeted audiences and authentic content, achieving maximum communication impact at a lower cost.

For example, the maternal and baby influencer @Kristina W, who has only 3677 followers, once posted a 5-second real-scene short video simply recording the daily routine of changing her baby's Coterie diaper.

Image source: TikTok

This minimalist real-experience video ultimately gained over 2 million views and 59,100 likes.

It can be seen that real-scene, real-shot content from ordinary moms and vertical influencers, with high authenticity and strong trustworthiness, is more likely to resonate with target audiences, effectively increase users' willingness to stay, and greatly boost brand seeding and user purchase conversion.

Image source: TikTok

Final thoughts

Looking back at the brand Coterie, it is just one cross-section of countless new opportunities in the overseas market.

In today's global consumer market, the speed of product iteration on the supply side, channel forms, and content distribution methods are all rapidly changing, which precisely brings a rare window of opportunity for domestic enterprises.

In the past, many categories were controlled by multinational giants, but the needs of the new generation of consumers have changed. As long as you are willing to dive into the target market to understand users' true feelings and compete with new product definitions and communication methods, small brands still have the opportunity to gain a firm foothold.

Now is a suitable time to seriously consider entering the market. The real question is not whether to go overseas, but how to start.