A bit of history
How did the company emerge? Where? In what year was it established?
The company began its activity in 2014 as an e-commerce for Birth Gifts: bebedeparis.com.
To launch Bebedeparis.com, we took advantage of an existing Limited Liability Company (SL) that used to be our physical baby clothing store in Sant Cugat del Vallés, which we had transferred years before.
When we had the “physical store,” we already realized that the business was in the online realm and focusing on companies that wanted to send a gift to their employees when they had a child.
¿Quién gestiona la compañía? ¿Cuál es el track record de fundadores y gestores?
Elena Gómez del Pozuelo 
CEO of Baby Friendly Companies SL
She is a highly recognized international entrepreneur in Spain with experience in e-commerce, internet, and digital marketing. She has 25 years of experience in running an online business from ideation to profitability. She has been nominated by Forbes among the top 10 most influential Spanish business people: https://forbes.es/listas/76585/los-100-mejores-influencers-2020/91/
She has been nominated by LinkedIn entre las 10 personas más influyentes de España.
She founded her first company in 2000: Secretariaplus.com and Directivosplus.com, and sold it in 2007 to USG individuals for 10 times the investment. One of the few Spanish companies that survived the internet crisis of 2001. She co-founded womenalia.com in 2011, where she serves as non-executive president. It is an AI and big data company, with a technological tool that helps Spanish and Latin American women achieve their professional goals (350,000 women on the platform).
In 2014, she co-founded bebedeparis.com, now transformed into BabyFriendlyCompanies.com, where she is the CEO. It is a technological platform that helps companies support their employees with children. She is a board member of several successful internet companies that she co-founded: cocunat.com, incipy.com, inesdi.com, increnta.com, and canamedics.com. She has served as President of Adigital (Spanish Digital Economy Association) and a member of the CEOE Executive Committee for 10 years. She has over 29,900 professional contacts on LinkedIn and has over 93,200 followers on Twitter: twitter.com/gomezdelpozuelo
Sara Fernández de la Aldea
President of Baby Friendly Companies SL
Over 25 years of experience in purchasing and designing baby products in Asia, logistics, export, import, and business relationships with large companies.
How has the company evolved? What have been the main milestones?
Founded in 2014, Bebedeparis.com.
International expansion from 2015 to 2018: creation of bebedeparis.co.uk, bebedeparis.fr, bebedeparis.de, bebedeparis.mx, bebedeparis.eu.
The first external partners joined in 2015/2016, including a family office from Bilbao, Aroñuca, and a crowdfunding campaign (totaling around €400,000).
An attempt to implement a franchise model in other countries that did not work well, and we regained ownership of the franchises in Mexico, France, and Germany.
Two residual franchises still in operation:
- South Africa: https://www.bebedeparis.co.za/
- Czech Republic: https://www.bebedeparis.cz/
In 2018, our largest corporate clients began requesting additional services to help attract and retain young talent who want to have or already have young children.
We started designing Baby Friendly Companies, creating an ethical code, a seal of guarantee, and practical baby-friendly programs to assist companies in supporting their employees on the parenting journey. For this transformation, a small fund called “Copernion,” led by Juan Manuel Barrionuevo, invested €350,000.
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jubarrionuevo
In 2019, Baby Friendly Companies officially launched (we also changed the company’s name). It is a digital project with significant social impact, disruptive and innovative, aiming to address the declining birth rate in Spain.
- Problem: Birth rate crisis in Spain. It has decreased by 50% in the last 10 years, and one of the main causes is the mass entry of women into professional life and the delay in the age of having children. The average number of children per woman is 1.2, and the age of the first child is 32 years old.
- Solution: Programs with digital services for companies to achieve equality and the well-being of employees by supporting them on their parenting journey. In this way, employees feel that the company will help and care for them during the happiest and most important moment of their lives: when they have a child and their lives change completely.
2020/2022: We went through the pandemic, and many companies realized the great importance of emotional salary and taking care of employees, especially those with young children who have been greatly affected during the pandemic.
Originality and creativity of the business project:
There are studies from renowned business schools like IESE that confirm that while only 4% of men see their careers negatively affected when becoming fathers, women experience a 70% slowdown or even regression in their professional lives. The moment of motherhood and fatherhood is when the greatest inequality between men and women occurs.
It is under this context that Baby Friendly Companies was born, aiming to offer a creative solution to a problem that continues to worsen worldwide. A “Baby Friendly Company” seal has been created, awarded to companies that comply with the ethical code of the 10 Baby Friendly principles and choose a digital program to support parents when they have a child.
