For a little over six months, a Milwaukee startup co-founded by health care professionals has been shipping pregnant women across the country boxes of curated educational items and products.
Wumblekin, which sells its boxes of curated goods via a subscription service, is a subsidiary of Illinois and Wisconsin-based health care provider Advocate Aurora Health. Frontline health care workers at Advocate Aurora created the company in 2018 through an internal idea challenge program produced by the health care provider. The startup is the first company to fully launch from the idea challenge program.
"For women getting ready to give birth, there's so much noise out there," said Wumblekin co-founder Erin Stumbras, who also works as a venture innovation specialist at Advocate Aurora Health. "There's so many contradictory opinions on what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing, how much you should be eating, should you be exercising, what products are best ... so we thought, 'Let's curate the right education with a multidisciplinary panel of experts at Advocate Aurora.'"
That panel includes chiropractors, obstetricians, lactation specialists and pediatricians. Stumbras co-founded the company with Andrea DuMez, a labor and delivery nurse at Advocate Aurora Health.
"All these experts came together and said, 'This is the education women need to know at each trimester, labor and delivery, and postpartum, and these are the products that complement the education,'" Stumbras said.
The company also creates informative online content for pregnant women. The products included in boxes are manufactured by other companies, some of them by Wisconsin businesses. The five box, trimester subscription is $49.99 and the ultimate labor and delivery box is $69.99.
"In a subscription form, it takes all of the pressure off of moms to think of what they need for the next step," Stumbras said.
This story has been updated to clarify the delivery timeline of the curated boxes.
