A Baby Shark’s tale: Whole Kids shows how strong relationships can be crucial to business growth

It’s nice to be nice, and as a B Corp committed to getting healthy, organic snack foods into the hands of little ones, no business knows this better than Whole Kids.

But in business, community, connection and relationships are more than nice-to-haves. They can boost creativity, lead to collaboration and simply provide a supportive network in which to bounce ideas around.

For Whole Kids, those genuine relationships also led to opportunities.

In October last year, co-founders Monica and James Meldrum secured a partnership with the brand behind the viral YouTube sensation Baby Shark.

The deal saw Whole Kids products on sale in North Korea, complete with Baby Shark branding. The launch coincided with the release of a movie and TV show from Pinkfong, the Korean creators of the YouTube video and incessant ear-worm that’s familiar to parents all over the world.

It was a huge win for the Aussie business — a deal that could put their brand in front of millions of kids, and offer a leg-up into the lucrative Asian market.

The partnership also served to further the business’ broader mission, to get healthy food into the hands, and stomachs, of as many children as possible.

Since then, Whole Kids has closed a second equity crowdfunding raise, securing $1.23 million from 486 investors.

It has also completed successful reviews with both Woolworths in Australia and Countdown in New Zealand, with both increasing their range on sale by 40%.

Whole Kids products are set to launch in Aldi in March this year, and the team is gearing up to launch six new products lines to the market in May.

SmartCompany Plus caught up with Monica Meldrum to unpack how this growth has been made possible through industry relationships — and exactly how the Aussie business hooked a Baby Shark.

Whole Kids co-founders James and Monica Meldrum with their kids Chloe and Sam. Source: Whole Kids.

Hiring up

Partly, the Baby Shark deal — and securing a foothold in Asia — was possible because the Meldrums hired agencies as well as in-house team members who specialise in operations, sales and customer services relating to exports.

The ability to make these new hires was largely funded by Whole Kids’ 2020 equity crowdfunding campaign.

On the operational side, one of their new hires immediately set about moving the business’ third-party logistics to a purpose-built facility more suited to large-scale e-commerce and exporting, Meldrum explains.

At the same time, a new sales gun started building new partnerships and relationships, opening up new opportunities in Australian retail and food service.

Having highly skilled experts in these areas working alongside the founders, who obviously know their product and their mission inside out, simply “takes the business to the next stage”, Meldrum says.

The power of relationships

But the secret to Whole Kids’ recent international success goes a little deeper than that.

According to Meldrum, Building strong and genuine relationships in the industry has been integral to Whole Kids’ success, right from the start.

For example, initial talks around the Baby Shark deal came about through mutual contacts, she explains.

 

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When the founders originally dreamt up the idea for Whole Kids, they met with multiple other business owners in the organic foods sector, bouncing their ideas around and receiving invaluable advice and support.

They kept in contact with many of them, and in early 2021, it was one of these business owners who reached out with an opportunity.

These contacts had some good friends operating in the South Korean market, who were looking for an organic, vegan snack range for kids.

Of course, Whole Kids fit the bill perfectly. And of course, those South Korean contacts were in fact working with Pinkfong, custodians of the Baby Shark brand.

The businesses entered discussions, and the rest is history.

Keep your contacts close

The deal was ultimately secured on the strength and fit of the product. But the network the Meldrums had been building since day one played a key role in Whole Kids getting in the room and starting a conversation.

“Things have gone full circle,” Meldrum notes.

It’s not only about connections. It’s about maintaining personal and business relationships with other people in your industry, or adjacent to it. There’s personal and social value to be found, ideas to be shared and refined, and — as Meldrum found — the potential of business opportunities further down the track.

And that’s the lesson this entrepreneur would like to pass on to others.

“Keeping up that network and those relationships is so important,” she says.

“It helped us get this partnership going quite quickly because there was a level of trust there that we had established,” she adds.

“Network within your industry and outside of your industry, and grow that as your business grows.”