Women’s health tech brand Elvie is expanding into sleep products

Elvie, which also makes pelvic floor trainers, launched in 2013 in the U.K. Its wearable breast pumps — of which it has sold 1 million to date — are best-sellers; in 2021, Elvie began offering its first breast pump covered by insurance. While it began as a direct-to-consumer online startup, Elvie also sells through channels including Target and Walmart. In 2024, Elvie acquired 35,000 new customers, said Fiona Dunleavy, Elvie’s global brand director. The company raised $80 million in funding in 2021.

After debuting its first wearable breast pump in 2018, Elvie is ready to enter a new market, Dunleavy said. “Ultimately, this is our next big category disrupter,” Dunleavy said of Elvie Rise. “We’re looking at how we expand and scale the [sleep] category because we think there’s huge potential in this space.”

Elvie Rise took a few years to develop and is rooted in research Elvie started in 2021. Elvie says it’s had conversations with hundreds of parents, many of whom said their biggest source of stress after feeding was baby soothing and sleep. Elvie Rise aims to give parents comfort because it follows safe sleep guidelines by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dunleavy said.

Like the rest of Elvie’s portfolio, Elvie Rise uses smart technology. Parents and guardians can operate its bouncer mode manually or automatically through an app. They can also record certain bouncing patterns that soothe their baby and have the product repeat those. Elvie Rise is available for pre-order for $799 on Elvie’s website starting January 6.

While Elvie is based in the U.K., its biggest market is the U.S. For this reason, Elvie Rise will be available to American customers first via Elvie’s website. Elvie aims to bring the product to U.S. wholesalers in the next few months, then to the U.K. and other European countries in the back half of 2025. Elvie hopes to deliver its first units in the next six weeks.

Nationwide, the market for products that get babies to sleep is worth more than $325 million a year, according to 2017 figures from the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association. The industry, however, also has a history of safety concerns — a topic Elvie wanted to tackle, Dunleavy said.

In 2019, Fisher-Price recalled millions of Rock N’ Play Sleepers after at least 30 reports of fatalities from infants rolling to their stomachs or sides while unrestrained in the Sleeper. Fisher-Price reissued a recall of the same product in 2023 after at least eight more deaths occurred. In 2024, Amazon, Babylist and Target stopped selling weighted baby sleep sacks and swaddles due to the potential dangers they posed to infants.

Leah Rocketto, associate commerce director at the baby products site What to Expect, told Modern Retail that U.S. organizations have checks and balances in place to make sure baby products are safe. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, for instance, ensures brands adhere to manufacturing safety guidelines and that their products pass regular, rigorous testing. (Thirty-four percent of the recalls that the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued in 2022 were from children’s products.) However, even with these guidelines, consumers can make mistakes when using sleep gear for babies, Rocketto explained.

“In my opinion, if a new product wants to succeed in the baby sleep space, it has to reduce — if not completely eliminate — any room for human error when using the product,” Rocketto said. “It also needs to solve a problem that many parents face. Elvie’s new sleep product has potential because it solves for one of these common problems: transferring your sleeping baby to a safe sleep space.”

When surveying nearly 1,500 U.S. parents, Elvie was able to identify that the majority of respondents’ babies under three months old were sleeping in products “not deemed sleep safe” by authorities, Elvie’s Dunleavy told Modern Retail. “We had a problem statement, and we wanted to challenge our research and engineering development team to come up with a solution,” she said.