Why baby brand Lalo is cutting prices on 90% of its products
Baby brand Lalo will lower its prices across its assortment of high chairs, bath accessories, toys and more as it seeks to gain market share and grow its presence in mass retail channels like Amazon.
As of Tuesday, the company will lower prices across about 90% of its products. That includes rolling back the price of its best-selling highchair, The Chair, from $235 to $195, the same price it was when it launched in 2019.
Michael Wieder, co-founder of Lalo, told Modern Retail that the company was able to make the price drops due to renegotiated agreements with its suppliers. By ordering more items, Lalo can drop its own costs and pass on the savings to its customers.
“Nothing about our products is changing. It’s made by the same exact standards, the same exact materials, the same high quality that people have grown to learn and trust,” he said. “But we want more parents and more families to be able to access that quality.”
Other price drops are going to smaller-ticket items. For example, a smock bib that previously cost $29.99 will now cost $16.99. The Play Kits for 1-to-2-year-old children will go from $135 to $110. Lalo’s baby bathtub will go from $68 to $59. Overall, Lalo will be cutting prices anywhere from 13% to 42%, depending on the item.
The strategy taps into a universal truth rippling through consumer behavior: shoppers are tired of high prices. And Lalo isn’t alone in thinking a shift to lower prices could help keep customers buying. Costco CFO Gary Millerchip in October said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call that it would lower prices on select items of its Kirkland brand. In May of last year, Target announced it was lowering prices on more than 5,000 grocery and household staples — and followed up with more price cuts in October, tallying up over 10,000 price cuts.
Gartner research released in December shows that nearly eight in 10 U.S. consumers are very or extremely concerned about costs of living, based on a survey of around 1,455 people in its 2024 Gartner Consumer Cultural Attitudes and Behaviors Survey. Shoppers are also increasingly concerned that brands are unnecessarily raising prices to boost profits, a sentiment shared by 59% of respondents, up from 53% in 2023.
Gartner analyst Kate Muhl said “price paranoia” is one of the top trends to watch in 2025. “Inflation is still having a massive effect on how people are behaving,” she said. “It’s not just that they’re price conscious, but they’re actually paranoid about prices because of the unpredictability.”
But companies that decide to give customers lower prices face another challenge: getting the customer to trust it, Muhl said. “I think it’s going to be a challenge for any brand trying to do what consumers want, which is either maintain or lower prices,” she said. “They have to make sure that the story around that move is transparent and authentic.”
For Lalo, the price drops and quest for a bigger audience come after the six-year-old brand spent much of 2024 expanding its product assortment, including adding more toys and play gear, like its imaginary play line of toys that sold out before Black Friday. It also added smaller items to complement its existing larger purchases, like snack cups and Bento boxes. The company raised a $10.1 million Series A in 2023, then closed an equity round with Forecast Labs in March of last year meant to help grow its footprint.
Lalo also began selling on Amazon in May 2023, which has become the company’s fastest-growing channel. Co-founder Greg Davidson said the lower price point gives the brand the potential to gain more customers wherever they’re shopping as it looks to branch out from its DTC origins to more mass retail. The company has experimented in the past selling through furniture retailers like West Elm. It also sells in Pottery Barn Kids and on the Babylist marketplace.
“This allows us to be a lot more competitive on price, and people can access a more premium brand and a much more accessible price point,” he said. “Ultimately, it ends up being healthy for the business from a profitability standpoint.”
Behind the scenes, the company spent several months negotiating the pricing changes with suppliers. While it worked out, it took some convincing. “You kind of have to paint the picture of how everybody is going to make more money, even as you’re negotiating a hard bargain on costs or whatever it is,” Wieder said. “It’s really about creating the strongest, strongest partnerships and getting personal with people.”
It also made sense for Lalo to lock in new arrangements before any potential tariff changes that could impact its budgets. In the last Trump administration, baby and juvenile products were exempt from tariff increases, a designation that he hopes will repeat. However, it’s unknown what any final rules may look like or what imports could be affected; Lalo’s supply chain is spread across seven countries.
“As we understand, the price of everything might continue to go up for one reason or another. We want to be more accessible to more parents,” Wieder said. “People might look at that and say, ‘What are you doing to your profitability?’ And we actually think we’re improving our profitability and our stance as a business by doing this.”