Jess Jacobs: CEO of Coterie

Episode 678

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by Jess Jacobs, CEO of Coterie—the premium baby care brand redefining the diaper industry with high-performance products, radical transparency, and a deep commitment to parents and babies alike. Since stepping into the CEO role, Jess has helped position Coterie as a category leader, challenging legacy players with modern innovation and an obsessive focus on quality.
During our conversation, Jess shares her path from Chief Brand Officer to CEO, the company’s commitment to product safety and third-party lab testing, and how Coterie has already sold over 500 million diapers since launching in 2019. We explore what it takes to disrupt a legacy category, build brand love in a competitive market, and create an experience that genuinely makes parents' lives easier.
Whether you're a mission-driven founder or a parent curious about the future of baby care, this episode is packed with insights you won’t want to miss. Now on The Kara Goldin Show.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Super excited to have my next guest with us. Here Today we have Jess Jacobs, who is the CEO of Coterie. And if you have not heard of this incredible, incredible brand, you are gonna be so excited to hear all about how this brand has really taken the baby care world by storm. So Jess journey didn’t start as a founder, but as the Chief Brand Officer, and she moved into CEO about a year ago. So inspired by her, not only her journey, but also her leadership Coterie has grown into a trusted and beloved brand for parents, offering premium diapers and wipes that are not only high performing, but grounded in transparency, innovation and an unwavering commitment to quality with over 500 million diapers sold. That’s in a lot of diapers since launching in 2019 Coterie is proving that even the most traditional industries are ripe for disruption when you put the consumer first, and I can’t wait to dive into this journey, they are about 90% direct to consumer, but they have also gone into incredible stores, which Jess, I’m sure we’ll talk about. So welcome, Jess, really excited that you’re here.

Jess Jacobs 2:06
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. That intro was so flattering and so nice. And yeah, I’m so excited to get into it with you. Super

Kara Goldin 2:15
excited. So Coterie, how do you describe it to your friends when they say, Jess, what is Coterie?

Jess Jacobs 2:24
So the way I would describe it is first, I would actually take a step back to sort of set the scene of why we exist in the first place, because I think that’s an important part of this. A lot of people don’t realize that diapers are actually a very big business. It’s an $8 billion business in the US diapers and wipes together is about a $12.3 billion business. And for a very long time, we believe that parents have just sort of accepted subpar offerings in terms of textures and ingredients and performance. And, you know, innovation in the past, it’s felt like it’s been framed as just more, more skews, more marketing differentiations that really didn’t move the needle, at least for parents. And that’s really the world in which we came up in about five and a half years ago, where there wasn’t where that those were the truths. And also there wasn’t a premium offering that was actually bringing more in terms of the value of performance, safety, high quality altogether. So Coterie is a modern Baby Care Brand changing everything about changing. We like to say the play on word there. We engineer high performing, safe products, and we also offer concierge level services, all with the mission and goal of making parents lives easier.

Kara Goldin 3:53
So you came in as the Chief Brand Officer. I was actually

Jess Jacobs 3:57
SVP of brand marketing and creative and Product Marketing first, okay, then moved up to Chief Brand Officer, and then became CEO. So it was, it was more of a three steps and direction, I would say. And

Kara Goldin 4:14
what attracted you to the company in the first place, when you were first looking at this opportunity.

Jess Jacobs 4:21
My background is in helping to build premium brands and really understanding those audiences. Doing that with a superior product is so much more fun and fulfilling. It really is. I’ve done it with every type, and the better the product, the better the storytelling and potential. I mean that that’s an obvious one. I was a new mom at the time. It was 2020. Just had my first baby, Penelope, and I was using one of the incumbent diaper brands, and very much just sort of putting up with it. And. Realizing I should want and deserve better. I was dealing with diaper rash. I was doing laundry in the morning because the sheets were wet. I was dealing with nightly wake ups, thinking that maybe she’s hungry, maybe she’s just cranky, tired, over tired. This that the reality is, a lot of babies wake up at night because they’re cold, because they’re urinating through the night, the liquid is hitting their warm skin, their 98 degree skin, and it has this chilling effect, honestly, that wakes babies up our diaper, the COVID re diapers wick liquid away from the skin within seconds, allowing, in the best case scenarios, the baby to continue sleeping through the night. So I was dealing with all of those things. I was introduced to Coterie founder. I tried the diapers for the first time. I hadn’t known about them or heard about them, and I immediately saw the difference it made, not just for my daughter, but for me as the parent and my lifestyle and my busy, busy working schedule. It took a load off of my shoulders. It truly and I saw so that’s part one. I experienced the difference myself, the ripple effect of it, and I saw this incredible opportunity to craft a brand at every single touch point, soup to nuts from scratch, to do it internally with a team that I love and care for and have worked with, you know, some of which Many years, and to build this unique, differentiated brand in the baby space that could feel more parent centric, a bit more elevated, a bit more performance and data driven, just really speaking eye to eye with the parent, versus feeling goo Gaga. You know, having that whitewashy effect of parenting is just sunsets and roses and perfect and pastels. And you know, it was an opportunity to get real through my lived experience too.

Kara Goldin 7:11
So interesting. What do you think is one misconception people have about building a brand today, and maybe that’s different than when you were first starting out in actually building a brand. But do you think it’s changed?

Jess Jacobs 7:28
You know, I don’t know if this is a misconception, but I think it might be. I think sometimes people believe reimagining a brand, redesigning a brand, is just those audience surface level touch points, not the deeper work, not the foundational level work. And really, if you want to reimagine a brand in a way that it is felt and known and experienced by your customers, you have to go in and it starts at the company core culture level with your mission, your vision, your who you want to be in this world. What are the promises that you want to make? All of that internal language that never sees the light of day, but is so important to get every single person at your brand on board holding hands, and understand what they’re doing and where the direction is going, because then, as you’re putting the physical pieces in place that interact with a customer, every single person at the company understands what that goal is, what that mission is, and how they can bring it to life at the customer service level, at a fulfillment level, at every single part of the business, everyone is aligned. And customers today are really, really smart and attuned to marketing, to every type of communication that they’ll have with a brand. They know a brand’s voice, and if something feels off, or if something feels like different parts of a company or talking to them in different ways, it immediately disconnects.

Kara Goldin 9:12
Yeah, I totally I totally agree. I think you guys have done such an incredible job in being transparent, publishing, third party testing. I mean, there’s always this challenge between making it super simple. Obviously, the diaper has to work. You can’t have leaks. And you know, all those things that I would imagine are, you know, definitely things that you’ve all talked about and thought about. But I think there is a group of consumers, especially today, as information has become, you know, more and more available the why. And I think you guys have made it very simple for those who want simple, but also, you know, they want to know why they’re being. Be sleeping longer at night, but yet, how much of that is available to be on the shelf at Air one, for example, like, how do you how do you get that out there in in a way that is simple and relevant and, you know, still transparent? You’ve done such a great job doing it.

Jess Jacobs 10:21
Thank you. You know, to me, when you talk about that, it really it brings me back to earlier days of my career. I was a creative director at an agency, and my biggest client, my number one client, was apple, and I got to work really, really closely and embed with that team. They to me, are the North Star of balancing the simplicity with the technical and transformative. Yeah, they’re able to bring you along for the ride and lead you down the path of as far down as you want to go. And if an apple customer just wants to understand at a high level, what is the functional benefit of this new product, for me, they can just get that. It’s simple, it’s succinct, it’s clean. It maybe has a double entendre and a ton of sorts. It maybe doesn’t, and that’s it. If somebody wants to go further and literally, just scroll down that PDP, they can and they can find out all of the little details, all of the little details. So it’s in the customer’s hands, essentially, to investigate and uncover as much as they want to. But we at Coterie put it all out there.

Kara Goldin 11:41
Yeah, definitely. So what did you What have you learned about this consumer that has kind of surprised you? Obviously, you kind of have two consumers, the baby, of course, and also the caregiver, so the parent. But what have you learned that has surprised you more than anything in sort of working, I guess, in this category, but also in building the brand and now running the company.

Jess Jacobs 12:09
I don’t know if it’s surprised me so much as it’s really confirmed a deeply held belief that I’ve had because I had it for myself, which was modern parents today are ready to be more real about their experiences. They’re ready to have conversations about mom guilt, about the things that stress them out, about the highs and the lows. You know, we’re talking to a customer that is in such a gentle phase of life, and there is so much newly on their shoulders that sometimes are very much two sides of the same coin, but don’t always go together, and that’s sort of what parenting is, right? It’s like, you know, all day you’re kind of exhausted, and you’re ready for bedtime. It comes, they go to sleep, and then you sit on the couch and look at pictures of them, and you’re like, I want to wake them up. And you’re like, but I just spent all day waiting for it to go. It doesn’t always make sense, and that’s okay, but parents are ready to go there in a way that I don’t know that it was ever normalized before.

Kara Goldin 13:44
How different is your role today, when you became CEO, versus versus building the brand? I think you know, there’s, it’s just expanded, right, that you’re it’s not just about making sure that you’re in touch with the consumer. Of course, none of that goes away in your role. But How different is it for especially for anybody who’s really had similar experience to you, like, what advice would you give them? And sort of knowing what you know today and being thrown in

Jess Jacobs 14:18
in reality, it’s really different if I looked at what I am responsible for today, what my calendar looks like today, if you had told me, as the 22 year old copywriter, that I would be overseeing a finance department, I wouldn’t have believed you, but this is a terrible analogy, and I’m so sorry for this, but I can’t think of anything else, and it’s coming to me right now. It’s kind of like the frog in the boiling water I came in, and the water was warm, and then it’s getting hotter and hotter, and I don’t even notice it now, because I did. Come in, and it was immediately this very easy progression towards taking on more and doing more for this brand, for this business. And I’ve lived and breathed it for years. So now as CEO, if I look back, it’s very different from even where I started coming into this brand. But it hasn’t felt like this flash of transformation to being a CEO. It’s felt like this gradual

Kara Goldin 15:35
live well, and I think that’s the advantage of you kind of growing up in it, and to some extent. So I mean, it’s, it’s being able to, really, you sort of had a boot camp of understanding the brand, and then ended up moving into this role, which is really fortunate in many ways. So it’s, it’s, as you went into the CEO role, is there one decision that you had to make that was really, really difficult, and what did you learn from that? This is a good

Jess Jacobs 16:11
question, and I wish I had a really clear example of this and answer, because I think it’s an important one, and maybe I haven’t faced that yet, but up until this point, all of the decisions have felt very clear to me, like the very clear next step. We are a very worth startup that is so that is digitally native. We move very quickly in so many ways in terms of being there for our customer, testing and learning, integrating AI, things of that nature. But when it comes to product development, we are slow because we really invest in R and D. We take time. We don’t create anything that isn’t demonstrably better than what already exists in the marketplace. Right now. We have five products.

Kara Goldin 17:12
So it’s a very focused, focused business.

Jess Jacobs 17:16
So nothing is white labeled. We do a ton of research, a ton of learning and a ton of safety testing, so it all feels very methodical and quite in line for us. So there hasn’t been this big moment of divergence to make a big call, honestly,

Kara Goldin 17:43
when you’re doing new product lines, I mean, you just mentioned you have five products, but how, how do you evaluate what comes next?

Jess Jacobs 17:52
Honestly, it comes from the customer. It’s really what we’re hearing from them that they want from us, and then an evaluation of, Can we do it better than anyone’s done it before?

Kara Goldin 18:09
Yeah, I think that that’s so interesting. Do you want to talk about your five lines as well?

Jess Jacobs 18:14
Absolutely. So we have our tape diaper, our hero product that we launched with, apparel grade back sheet, incredibly absorbent, incredibly high performing, soft, luxurious, gentle feeling helps keep diaper rash away. It’s just everything you could want in a diaper. Truly. The next step from there is our pant, which is a beautiful, beautiful pleated waistband for breathability and ease of movement. It’s a resealable also it won the Fast Company Design Innovation Award, not just in the baby category, but just in all categories. Because of that refillable waistband. We have two different beautiful, beautiful wipes that are large and gentle and soft, but also really sturdy, so your hand isn’t going to break through when you’re dealing with a messy change. We have our water wipe, which is just a couple of really safe simple ingredients. We have our soft wipe, which has a bit more emollient to it and sort of a moisturizing effect that can really help the skin barrier. And then we have our swim diaper, which is perfect for water play.

Kara Goldin 19:32
It’s super, super great. So, so the baby care space is evolving. What do you think the future of parenting products really looks like in the next five years?

Jess Jacobs 19:44
I can speak to the diapering space and tell you that premium is the fastest growing segment. It’s grown 22% and we do know that 74% of parents are willing to trade up for a better performing and better quality diaper. Her, and since day one, that’s been the focus. Is premium products that truly outperform. That’s been the intention. That’s what sets our roadmap, essentially. So we see a lot of growth and a lot of runway

Kara Goldin 20:17
within that space. That’s That’s awesome. And I think that what you’re doing that kind of separates you from the standard diapers too, is you’ve really created this community that really touches on that upscale group that really is your consumer and you’re targeting when you think about your journey thus far. What was the moment when you maybe started to hear some of this feedback from consumers, and you thought, we’re gonna like, we’re not only gonna make it, but this is gonna be a really, really big brand.

Jess Jacobs 20:55
It’s a great question. Anecdotally, I was hearing it, but I also didn’t know if you know, my friends and family were just being really kind and supportive. For me, it’s all about the data and just really being able to see from the actual market how everyone is responding to us, to our product, to our brand, all things we have the number one NPS score, I love that 40% of our new customers just come in from word of mouth. That’s completely organic. So that’s really the flywheel for our entire marketing system, and helps make our spend and cap all the more efficient, because we have 40% of people just coming in because a parent friend told them about us. A sister told them about us, a mom told them about us, and then between 10 and 12% are coming in because, coming in as a subscriber, because they tried us on the shelf or saw us on the shelf. So we’re using wholesale and retail as a discovery tool for marketing right now. So all of those things, like really working together, seeing that 85% of the revenue is recurring or retention is off the charts, just all of these things, really working in concert and in harmony gives me, gives us the confidence that we are doing something right. That’s

Kara Goldin 22:27
awesome. So you went into stores after you had built a successful direct to consumer built business, which is about 10% of your overall business. So incredible brands like air one, Whole Foods, etc. How has you you talked about that’s really helped you to build out the rest of your business? But what have you learned about those different businesses? Because they really are a different business. You have to deal with brokers or distributors. You know, it’s just, it’s just different. Plus, you don’t necessarily get the consumer name and number and all of the data that you would get, but it’s still really important. I’d love to hear your take on sort of maybe the hard part about it, what you’ve learned about working with the offline. I call it

Jess Jacobs 23:30
exposure. It is totally different. It’s been really insightful and inspiring to be in these spaces and and understand the rules of the road there, because you’re right. It’s a completely different, completely different world. We have had the great benefit of being number one, the number one, most productive everywhere we enter. So that’s we’re number one in Whole Foods, number one, most productive in Wegmans. We’re the only diaper in our one but I’ll also say we’re the most productive there than a born brand there, for sure. But you’re right. It’s you’re dealing with a lot more. Let’s say that you’re you know, the margins are different. Everything is different. What we also love about D to C and the E comm side of the business is that diapering is really this journey of transformation as your children child is growing and gaining that independence which is so important, and It’s what we absolutely root for. We’re able to help usher you along in that journey and in that process. When you’re a subscriber, even more so, because we’re able to say, based off of the information that we have and how long you’ve been in this side, we’re able size. We’re able to nudge you and say you’re probably. Will be ready for the next one. In some cases, we may even send a trial pack of the next size, but we are able to help with that piece of sort of keeping you in our LTV, in our journey, and helping you be in the diaper size that is going to fit right, because the number one cause of leaks with our diaper is just the wrong size. And that’s something we can’t, you know, go into your home and help size you with, obviously. So that’s the second best thing. And on the shelf we we don’t have that opportunity, of course, but we’re able to physically be there for more people in more places. So it continues to be a very active conversation, and something I’m thinking about all the time. Of course, again, everything we do is slow and methodical and thoughtful. So it’s been an intentional journey thus far, and we’re still on it. What

Kara Goldin 26:01
do you hope for the brand? Maybe, you know, a few years from now, you’re looking back, what do you hope you’ve accomplished

Jess Jacobs 26:10
a lot, a lot in different sort of contexts, right? I think looking at the business, our unit economics are absolutely stellar, keeping every chart going up into the right is my priority and focus period that operational excellence as a creative and brand person, I’d love to look back on even more big moments for us where we really do surprise and delight our customers and show Just how inventive and interesting and deep a baby care brand can be. And for our customers, I just want to keep them really happy, and, you know, keep making their lives just a little bit easier by using us and being there for them and never disappointing them.

Kara Goldin 27:23
I love it well. Jess, thanks so much for joining us today. Coterie is awesome, and it’s everyone needs to try it. I love getting the back stories of the brands and and the journey of building and scaling, and you’ve done such a great job of sharing all of that with us. So for everyone listening, be sure to head to Coterie.com to learn more and try the brand that parents everywhere are raving about. It’s you’re doing an excellent job you and the entire company. So thank you again, and

Jess Jacobs 27:59
until next the team effort, I will say, yeah, definitely, and

Kara Goldin 28:04
and everyone, thank you for listening. Have a great rest of the week. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now. You.

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