A Sydney mum-of-two has just landed a deal to stock her products on Priceline’s shelves, 11 years since she got her business off the ground.
Rhian Allen, 43, is best known by her moniker ‘The Healthy Mummy’, a company that helps mothers pre-, during- and post-pregnancy to lose weight and generally keep healthy.
Ms Allen quit her corporate job and sold her home in 2010 while she was six months pregnant with her first child.
Using the $300,000 leftover from selling the house, she poured it into The Healthy Mummy.
By 2018, the business was turning over $22 million in revenue a year.
Last year, Priceline approached Ms Allen to sell her stock.
The deal, announced on Friday, will see the Healthy Mummy’s core products stocked in 470 Priceline stores by mid-September.
“Honestly, hand on heart, I didn’t think this would make me lots of money or become a big business. I just thought it would be something to do...Something I was able to do at home while bringing up my kids,” Ms Allen told news.com.au.
The entrepreneur came up with the idea for the Healthy Mummy when she started looking into support groups and fitness tips for new mums.
There were none.
“I was gaining weight obviously being pregnant, which was a new world for me, and I started to do some research,” Ms Allen said.
“Nothing had actually addressed what happened to a woman after she’d had a baby, how to regain that health and fitness body confidence.”
There was also another plus side to the decision of becoming her own boss – she could still be there when her child was growing up.
“It was something I was able to do at home while bringing up my kids,” she said.
The chief executive has two boys, aged 8 and 10.
“I went into it quite blindly. Maybe I had some pregnancy hormones,” she added with a laugh.
Two years later, she was “drowning” in orders, causing her husband John also quit his job in corporate to work with her.
The Healthy Mummy officially started from a social media post in 2010.
Ms Allen made a Facebook page – this was before Facebook groups existed – which went “through the roof”.
“I said, ‘Who wants to trial it (a product) for free?’ I was bombarded,” she said.
“I gave it to 20-odd mums.”
Since then, it’s expanded to a multi-millionaire business, with 150 staff, and products in the US and UK.
Social media remains a key component of making sales, with Ms Allen saying 53 staff members – a third of her workforce – are employed on a full-time basis to moderate comments and get rid of the “nasty ones”.
The Healthy Mummy has extensive meal and exercise plans, supplements, healthy smoothies, recipe books, merchandise with the business expanding its offering more recently incorporating a skincare line, a new meal-delivery service and new Healthy Man Replacement.
There is also an app to access all the products.
“We have products for 50-year-old mums, we have a men’s range, we have a healthy kids range,” she said.
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“We launched a kids and mums workout range. We’ve evolved as the years have gone by.”
Before now, the Healthy Mummy has been a completely online retail business.
Ms Allen said she expects sales to “increase considerably” now that they will be in brick and mortar stores.
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