How do you design support for returning mothers in the workplace?
IA Collaborative engaged leading brands Medela and Mamava in their coalition efforts to define
an offering strategy aimed at improving a returning mother’s experience in the workplace. Guiding the Medela and Mamava teams through design thinking and mission-focused collaboration activities, the IA team coalesced an incredibly intense workshop with two strong brands into one cohesive marketing plan outline, delivering positioning, guiding principles and recommendations to successfully launch New Moms’ Healthy Returns, a program designed to deliver equipment, space, advocacy, and tools for breastfeeding mothers and the employers who support them. Post-launch, the IA Collaborative team designed the New Moms’ Healthy Returns welcome experience, creating the next evolution of the NMHR New Parent Welcome Box.
1 / Support for Returning Moms is Good for Business
Leveraging thoughtful experience design, IA Collaborative helped the coalition define its service offering and mission. Medela and Mamava now have the foundation to launch their messaging and market strategy, grow their coalition, and act on the shared goal to change cultural perception toward breastfeeding and to improve outcomes for mothers and babies.
2 / Design Strategy for Discovery & Alignment
IA Collaborative designed an immersive, brand-agnostic experience for the client to explore and uncover its purpose and differentiators. Every touchpoint of the experience was created to reflect the feminine strength of the coalition itself and the future they envisioned. As part of the rollout strategy, IA Collaborative collected assets from the process to produce a branded video used for both internal socialization and external launch of the Healthy Returns program.
3 / A New Experience for Returning Parents
To onboard new mothers, partners, and their families to the NMHR program, IA Collaborative designed the next evolution of New Parent Welcome Box. To the IA team, it wasn’t just about designing a box, it was about taking a broader look at the needs and emotional states of women and their families across the prenatal and postnatal journey to identify support opportunities for everyone involved in the journey, including mothers, fathers, adoptive parents, and parents in unique circumstances – such as the birth of twins or premature births and NICU care. The reimagined Welcome Box included a set of animal-themed ‘Be Kind to Yourself Cards’ with motivational notes of encouragement for new parents that could also be used as stimulus for newborns as their eyesight develops; used as with toddlers as they learn about kindness; and an ongoing reminder of Medela’s benefits and support for returning parents.
4 / A Winning Partnership
IA Collaborative designed an experience to align Medela and Mamava’s key stakeholders, explore their strengths, and identify how best to work together as they serve the coalition’s mission and expand the Healthy Returns offering. Through IA’s collaborative approach, Medela and Mamava were able to make strategic introductions across their organizations and participate in empathy-based activities to understand each other’s strengths as partners. Through this work, Mamava and Medela launched a strategic partnership and holistic solution for breast-feeding mothers returning to work.
